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God's Way with man 











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GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


‘GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


An Exploration of the Method of the 





LA BY 


LILY DOUGALL 


Author of Pro Christo et Ecclesia, Ete. 


WITH INTRODUCTION AND BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
BY 


Canon B. H. STREETER 


jQemw Pork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1925 


All rights reserved 


CopyRIGHT, 1925, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 





Set up and printed. 
Published March, 1925. 


Printed in the United States of America by 
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK 


CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTION 
LILY DOUGALL: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
ESSAY 


I. PROVIDENCE AND MIRACLE 


II. GOD AS EDUCATOR 


» III. FORGIVENESS—HUMAN AND DIVINE . 


IV. THE WORSHIP OF WRATH . 


V. BEYOND JUSTICE . 


PAGE 


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INTRODUCTION 


Miss DoucGA.t had a rare faculty for seeing things re- 
ligious from a point of view quite different from that which 
strikes the ordinary mind. Critics said that this made her 
do insufficient justice to accepted views. Perhaps it some- 
times did. But for accepted views in religion there is never 
any lack of doughty advocates, the case for them runs no 
risk of going by default. Hence, if her essays are read, not 
as presenting ‘the conclusion of the whole matter,’ but as 
glimpses of truth seen by the flashing insight of a free and 
original mind, Orthodox and Modernist alike will find in 
them valuable food for reflection. 

Miss Dougall thought of man pityingly, of God_ largely. 
Conventional Christianity seemed to her to conceive of man 
on too exalted, of God on too small, a scale. “Towards 
the end of her life the conviction grew on her that one 
particular aspect of this misconception was prolific in results 
morally devastating. She saw clearly that the world in 
which we live is one in which the consequences of wrong- 
doing are inevitable and calamitous, but that as a rule they 
fall, in the first instance at any rate, on others than the 
wrongdoer. If, then, they are thought of as God’s punish- 
ment of evil, His action has no relation to the principles of 
justice. Again, while she would have nothing to do with a 
conception of the Love of God which imagined in Him an 
easy condonation of the enormities and vileness of mankind, 
she felt that to use the word ‘wrath’—in anything like its 
ordinary human acceptation—to describe His attitude to the 

5 


6 INTRODUCTION 


offender is a degrading anthropomorphism. To express 
the passionate vehemence of that attitude human language 
has not as yet provided the right word. Naturally, language 
has developed to describe human experience, and human 
anger rarely functions in a way that is likely to make it 
an adequate mirror of anything in the mind of God. But 
for us, merely for lack of the right word, to be content to 
ascribe to God feelings like ‘anger’ or ‘hate’ is not only to 
belittle the moral sublimity of His character, but is to exert, 
by so doing, a debasing and deadening influence on social 
and international ethics—an influence potent to block the 
path of human progress. 

The Lord of Thought, written in collaboration with 
Cyril Emmet and published by the Student Christian Move- 
ment in September, 1922, was in the main an attempt to 
bring out the creative originality of the teaching of Christ 
on this point. She was intending to follow this up with a 
book interrogating the universe, as revealed to us from the 
side of biological evolution and the history of human insti- 
tutions, in confirmation of this same idea. The book was 
never finished. But she had published in the Hibbert Jour- 
nal two articles which she had meant to incorporate in it— 
they are reprinted here, as Essays I and IV, by the kind 
permission of the editor—and the evening before she died 
she was engaged in putting the finishing touches to another 
essay—that entitled Beyond Justice. Certain other parts 
had been sketched out, and with a little patching of these 
and some other fragments it has been possible to present 
what is, at any rate, the main substance of the book she had 
in view. 


B. H. S. 


LILY DOUGALL 
A BrocrRapHicAL Note spy CANON STREETER 


Tue village of Cumnor has become famous in the Eng- 
lish-speaking world from its association with the names of 
two women, strangely contrasted both in character and for- 
tune. Amy Robsart is a type of helpless, tragic ineffective- 
ness; Lily Dougall, though she had her share of the sorrows 
that fall to the lot of man and was physically most frail, 
nevertheless, by the quality of her mind and character, and 
in circumstances more fortunate, lived a life in the highest 
sense a happy one, and in the widest and highest sphere 
effective and creative. 

She was born in Montreal, of Scotch descent, in 1858, 
and spent her early youth mainly in Canada, but partly in 
the United States. At the age of twenty she came to Edin- 
burgh in order to live with an aunt. For the next ten 
years or so she lived the quiet domestic life of filial duty. 
But, through the social connections of the Edinburgh home, 
she had the opportunity of associating with a number of 
persons of ability and distinction. "This had a marked effect 
on her in the way of stimulating intellectual interests and 
developing breadth of mind. She also read widely and at- 
tended lectures at the University. “Towards the end of the 
period she acquired a sufficient knowledge of Greek to be 
able to read the New Testament in the original language— 
an ability which at that time few women possessed. 

7 


8 LILY DOUGALL 


In 1891, at the age of thirty-three, quite suddenly, from 
the quiet obscurity of home life, she sprang into fame. In 
that year she published her first novel, Beggars All, which 
attracted unusual attention. It was a book that everyone 
talked about, and enjoyed that kind of vogue that causes 
certain folk to feel ‘out of it’ if obliged to confess that they 
have not yet read the book. During the next ten years 
she produced no less than ten novels—of which The Zeit- 
geist, The Madonna of a Day, A Dozen Ways of Love, 
and What Necessity Knows were perhaps the most success- 
ful. Another, The Mormon Prophet, is notable as being 
based on an original examination of the archives of the Mor- 
mons and on personal contact with some of their leaders, 
whose city she visited for the purpose of studying this inter- 
esting religious movement. 

With the beginning of the new century, her activities took 
a new direction. In 1900 she published Pro Christo et 
Ecclesia. ‘This, her first book of a definitely religious char- 
acter, made as great a sensation in the religious world as did 
her first novel in the sphere of fiction. But this time it did 
not make her personally famous; for the book was published 
anonymously—it bore on the title page no author’s name. 
In effect it is an appeal to people inside the churches, who 
are genuinely religious and believe that they stand for the 
cause of true religion, to ask themselves the question whether 
they may not be standing, like the zealous Pharisees of old, 
for a religion which resembles Pharisaism more closely than 
the religion of Christ. This was quickly followed up by 
three other books of considerable power and originality, 
Christus Futurus (now unfortunately out of print), Adsente 
Reo (a book especially praised by the reviewers) and Vo- 
luntas Dei. 


BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 9 


In 1911, in order to be near Oxford, she came to live 
in Cumnor, and at intervals published two other books, 
The Practice of Christianity and The Christian Doctrine 
of Health. Incidentally, so to speak, she and an old friend, 
Gilbert Sheldon, put out a little volume of light verse en- 
titled Arcades Ambo. But the intense activity maintained 
throughout her eleven years at Cumnor was mainly devoted, 
not to individual, but to co-operative, work. This was 
partly manifested in work on committees and in ‘fellowship’ 
movements, in London and other parts of the country; it 
was mainly exhibited, however, in making her house, ‘Cutts 
End,’ a centre for conferences and discussion for small 
groups of persons of very various shades of thought and dif- 
ferent ranges of experience, but ‘united in the desire to find 
some solution for the religious, moral and social problems 
of the present day. I quote from an article in The Times 
by Canon Barnes—as he then was—a valued friend of Miss 
Dougall: 


“She best deserves to be remembered, however, for the skill 
and sympathy with which she gathered in her house at Cumnor, 
near Oxford, groups of men and women interested ‘in religious 
problems. These gatherings had a quality peculiar to themselves, 
because of Miss Dougall’s personal charm and religious insight. 
Frail in physique and a little hesitant in speech, she was none 
the less the unifying centre of her various conferences. They were 
stimulating and strenuous, because conversation, argument, il- 
lustration, and repartee went on unceasingly. The gravest issues 
were discussed with sincerity and frankness; and the hostess was 
ever ready to prevent over-seriousness or ennui by flashes of sub- 
acid fun. These Cumnor gatherings were the source of three 
important books, Concerning Prayer, Immortality, and The Spirit. 
Each has already taken rank among the best collections of theo- 
logical essays of recent years. They are written from the stand- 
point of liberal orthodoxy and are singularly free from polemical 


10 LILY DOUGALL 


bitterness. To each scholars of weight contributed; and not in- 
frequently the reader comes upon passages of great religious 
depth and beauty.” 


Death has thinned the ranks of Miss Dougall’s closest 
associates in religious writing. A. C. Turner, the founder 
of the Anglican Fellowship, formerly Fellow of Trinity 
College, Cambridge, fell in the War; C. W. Emmet, Fellow 
and Dean of University College, Oxford, died suddenly in 
July 1923, while in New York where he was delivering a 
course of sermon-lectures; and in January 1924 died Arthur 
Clutton Brock, well known as the art critic of The Times 
newspaper, and the most brilliant writer of this ‘Cumnor 
Group.’ Miss Dougall herself passed away on October 9, 
1923. Her grave in Cumnor churchyard—in the angle 
formed by the nave and south transept of the Church— 
looks towards ‘Cutts End’ and over a wide and open view 
ringed in by the distant line of the Berkshire Downs. 

Along with the books, Concerning Prayer, Immortality 
and The Spirit, should be named one published by the Stu- 
dent Movement, much smaller in size but, in Miss Dougall’s 
opinion, not less important—God and the Struggle for Ex- 
istence. ‘These four group-books, together with the book 
entitled The Lord of Thought, which she wrote in con- 
junction with Cyril Emmet, she regarded as the most im- 
portant achievement of her life. 

As I was myself associated with her throughout, and 
acted as editor of the group-books, I am able to tell the 
way in which they originated, the purpose and idea which lay 
behind them, and the method by which they were produced. 
My first meeting with Miss Dougall was in November 
1914. I had, of course, many years before read Pro Christo 
et Ecclesia, and, like many others, had wondered who might 


Me 


BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE II 


be the unknown author of this remarkable book. Rumour 
attributed it first to one, then to another, eminent ecclesiastic 
or divine who, it was supposed, on account of his distin- 
guished position desired to remain anonymous. It had only 
quite recently leaked out that the book was written by ‘a 
little old lady who lived at Cumnor’—though the adjective 
‘old’ is inaptly applied to one whose vivacity, humour and 
keen zest for life made youthfulness seem her most notable 
characteristic. Canon Newsom had effected an introduction 
by letter, and I was asked one day to bicycle up from Oxford 
to lunch at ‘Cutts End.’ 

In the course of that same afternoon we conceived the 
plan of attempting to thresh out the idea of prayer, and, in 
particular, the conception of God which Christian prayer 
implies, by the method of group discussion—the results to 
be embodied in a group-book. This was the origin of 
Concerning Prayer. And I may perhaps add that, though 
I acted as editor throughout, the initial idea, not only of 
this, but of each of the subsequent volumes, was due to Miss 
Dougall; and the spirit which gave its special character to 
the group discussions out of which each volume was pro- 
duced, was what it was by reason of the ‘atmosphere’ which 
she created. 

The method of producing a group-book as a result of 
corporate discussion, with mutual criticism of the essays at 
various stages before they are put in print, was not new. 
It had been tried in a former generation by the authors of 
Lux Mundi, and more recently in Foundations. But the 
novelty in the Cumnor books was that the groups consisted 
of people belonging to more than one religious denomination 
and also included, along with ministers of religion and pro- 
fessional theologians, men who had made their mark in other 


12 LILY DOUGALL 


spheres of activity, such as Mr Clutton Brock, Mr Edwyn 
Bevan, Professor Pringle Patterson and Dr Hadfield, rep- 
resenting respectively the fields of Literature, History, Philo- 
sophy and the New Psychology. The assumption with 
which we all set out in these group-books was that there 
can be no real opposition between true religion and true 
science or true art. All truth, all beauty, all goodness must 
ultimately be of God. If there appears to be opposition 
between science or art and religion, it is because the human 
beings who are interested in these things partially miscon- 
ceive or misunderstand their real nature. 

The circulation and range of influence of the various books 
which were the product of these Cumnor discussions far ex- 
ceeded our wildest expectations. Of the group-books, the 
last three, as well as The Lord of Thought, were printed 
and published in America as well as in this country. The 
last time I saw Miss Dougall she showed me a letter from 
a bank clerk in Australia speaking of the revelation that The 
Lord of Thought, which had been published less than a year, 
had brought to him in a time of dejection and distress. The 
day after her death there came a letter from one of the most 
influential of the younger generation of Chinese Christians, 
saying that he was about to translate certain of the group- 
books into his own language. 

The summer of 1923 she spent in Canada visiting her 
brothers, the elder of whom, John Redpath Dougall, is 
known throughout the Dominion as owner and editor of 
the Montreal Witness, and a lifelong champion of righteous- 
ness in public life. While there, and on the return voyage, 
she was working on a Dramatic Sketch—The Infidelities of 
the Orthodox or The Old Faith and the New—a vivid 
presentation of the religious situation as viewed with the eyes 


BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 13 


of the younger generation. “Thus, in what was all but her 
latest writing, there were brought into play the very divers 
powers and interests which made her at one time a story- 
teller, at another an essayist on religious topics. It is hoped 
that this Dramatic Sketch may be published. 

Miss Dougall’s work could not have been carried through 
without the support of Miss M. S. Earp, her close friend 
for over thirty years. Miss Earp took charge of the prac- 
tical arrangements of the home and the work involved in 
organising the numerous conferences held at ‘Cutts End’; 
and also gave Miss Dougall invaluable assistance from the 
beginning in all her writings, in suggestion and criticism, 
as well as in the laborious work always involved in pre- 
paring manuscript for the press. As Miss Earp is still living 
at ‘Cutts End,’ we hope it will continue to be a centre of dis- 
cussion and, as it were, a workshop for constructive religious 
thought. 

But, in making all allowance for Miss Earp’s contribu- 
tion, the amount of solid hard work which Miss Dougall 
was able to get through is astonishing. “Twenty-four books, 
not to mention innumerable articles in magazines and papers 
read to societies, would have been a magnificent output for 
anyone of exceptional physical vitality. But, to look at her, 
you would suppose that she was one of those kindly but 
delicate and fragile creatures who, though they may inspire 
affection, can contribute little to the world’s work. If we 
ask the reason why Miss Dougall was not one of these, I 
am quite sure that the reply is this: Religion as she con- 
ceived it and as she practised it, was a source, not only of 
what is ordinarily spoken of as spiritual consolation and en- 
lightenment, but also of invigorating power. 

Miss Earp and I hope to publish a Memoir; in this place 


14 LILY DOUGALL 


I can only indicate the main ideas which Miss Dougall be- 
lieved to constitute the special message she was called upon 
to give to her generation. 

Above all, the Christian religion was to her a very simple 
thing, and a very practical thing. She felt that the way in 
which the great ideas of Christianity are commonly put be- 
fore the world is much too complicated; and is much too 
remote from the needs of ordinary men and women, and 
from practical everyday life. People sometimes said to her 
that they preferred the simplicity of traditional theology 
to that modern way of presenting religion which she was 
feeling after. She would reply: “But the old theology is 
not simple, it is merely familiar. When people have heard 
the same words repeated a great many times they come to 
think them simple and easy, just because they are not new; 
but they do not understand them. Real simpicity is some- 
thing that people can really understand; and real religion is 
something which is a source of power and inspiration to the 
individual in the face of the sorrow and the difficulties of 
life.” 

I may perhaps sum up what seemed to her to be the cen- 
tral message of the Gospel of Christ under four main con- 
ceptions. 

1. God is our Father. But God is better than man; 
therefore, His treatment of His children will be wiser and 
kinder than the way in which the best of human parents 
treats his children. “If ye being evil know how to give 
good gifts unto your children, how much more your heav- 
enly Father.” A good parent, if ever he punishes, will do 
so only in order to bring the wrongdoer to a better mind. 
Accordingly for many years she had continually protested, 
not only against the talk about ‘the wrath of God’ in some 


BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 15 


religious circles, but also against the idea that sickness and 
calamity are an expression of His will. Sickness and ca- 
lamity, she held, should, no more than sin, be thought of 
as the expression of the will of God. But towards the end 
of her life, stimulated by criticism passed on her earlier writ- 
ing, her thought on these topics underwent development, and 
she was feeling after the profounder philosophy which, in 
the pieces put together in this volume, she is striving to ex- 
press. 

2. She always thought of God as being like Christ. To 
her, as to St Paul, Christ was the ‘image’ of the unseen 
Father. It followed that God must be thought of as shar- 
ing in the suffering and battling with the evil in the world. 

I transcribe a passage from Christus Futurus, which gives 
striking expression to this idea: 

“Reason cries, ‘If God were good, he could not look upon the 
sin and misery of man and live; his heart would break.’ 

“The Church points to the Crucifixion and says, ‘God’s heart 
did break.’ 

“Reason cries, ‘Born and reared in sin and pain as we are, 
how can we keep from sin? It is the Creator who is responsible; 
it is God who deserves to be punished.’ 

“The Church kneels by the Cross and whispers, ‘God takes the 
responsibility and bears the punishment.’ 

“Reason cries, ‘Who is God? What is God? The name stands 
for the unknown. It is blasphemy to say we know Him.’ 

“The Church kisses the feet of the dying Christ and says, ‘We 
must worship the Majesty we see.’” 


3. She believed that, just as a child will simply ask its 
parents for what it needs, so it would be unnatural for God’s 
children not to express to Him in prayer simply and truly 
what they felt they wanted—knowing that He would give 
it them if it was really for their good. At the same time, 


16 LILY DOUGALL 


asking for things seemed to her the least important side of 
prayer. She once wrote to a friend: “Give yourself a short 
time every day just to ‘enjoy God.’”” She meant by this, 
holding one’s self in quiet receptive concentration of mind 
and heart, so that the All-pervading Presence of the Divine 
could enter into and fill one’s own feeble personality. It 
was along the lines of this sort of prayer that religion was 
to her a source of invigorating power. 

4. One of the group-books produced at Cumnor was en- 
titled Immortality. ‘Three of the five who contributed to 
that volume have now passed from this world. “They know 
now the truth concerning the things about which we talked 
and wrote. Miss Dougall’s beliefs about the future life 
were of a piece with her views on the character and nature 
of God. She thought of the life of the world to come as 
being a continuation and enrichment—an enrichment pass- 
ing all understanding—of the highest life that we know on 
earth. She thought of it as a life infinitely better than the 
present, but not entirely different—a life of cheerful work, 
and fellowship with kindred souls—lit up with humour, 
enjoyment of beauty and the love of God and man. She 
did not believe in Spiritualism; indeed, she thought that 
the attempts which so many people make nowadays to com- 
municate through mediums or automatic writing with the 
spirits of the dead, were fundamentally mistaken. Never- 
theless, she believed that the souls of the righteous are never 
far away from those they had loved on earth, and are still 
able to assist and inspire them by actual personal contact, 
but not a contact that shows itself through voices and 
visions. 

It was her custom year by year to print and send her 
friends, instead of an ordinary Christmas card, a little poem 


BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 17 


of her own. It will be appropriate to end by quoting one 
of these, written shortly after the death of a sister. It 
delicately reflects her conviction that the life in the Beyond, 
whatever its opportunities of growing vision and achieve- 
ment, can lack nothing of the human tenderness and grace 
of the life we know. 


“Grant beauty to our dead, 
And human care, and smiles; 

Oh, may they, having passed the hour of dread, 
Be cheered by homelike wiles! 


Lord of the quick, permit 
That friends and mirth be theirs, 
That in the joy of converse free and wit 
They learn new tears and prayers. 


Temper the winds of truth 
By love in earth-born guise; 

Grant that the fairest fancies of their youth 
Urge them to fresh emprise! 


Christ of the inward grace 
Both near and far Thou art, 

Death is no portal of Thy hiding-place; 

Oh, may our dead fare forth at quicker pace, 
Thy sunrise in the heart.” 





GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


ESSAY I 
PROVIDENCE AND MIRACLE 


We know how, when Jove shook his hair and nodded, 
impossible things happened on earth for the benefit of his 
favoured suppliants; and in the great prayer in the Apoc- 
alypse of Baruch (liv. lv.) Jehovah is thus addressed: 

“Thou alone, O Lord, knowest of aforetime the deep things 

of the world, 
For whom nothing is too hard, 
But thou doest everything easily by a nod.” 


This is the first natural human hypothesis about God. 
It merged early as a childish conception when the sphere 
of Divine activity was conceived as paltry, and became au- 
gust when the human grasp of mind was enlarged. When 
there were many gods, each limited by all the rest, the activi- 
ties of the tribal god were small because the tribal activities 
were small; but later the One high God, who could always 
easily compel all earthly agents to His will, became supremely 
worthy of reverence. 

“The king’s heart is in the hand of Jahveh, ... he turneth it 
whithersoever he will” (Prov. xxi. 1). “Isaiah the prophet cried 
unto the Lord; and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, 

19 


20 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz” (2 Kings xx. rr). 
“Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth, 
in the seas, and all deep places” (Ps. cxxxv. 6). 


The difficulty in accepting this conception of a God who 
can always do easily exactly what He wills, faces us in every 
victory of chaos over order, of evil over good. It is the 
time-honored dilemma:—if the sorry scheme of things on 
earth is fashioned to God’s desire, God is not good; if God 
is good, He cannot be powerful enough to fashion the 
world to His will. But the religious mind ceaselessly in- 
sists that God must be both all-good and all-powerful, and 
has devised more than one scheme of the universe with a 
view to resolve the dilemma. 

The solution first offered consisted in explaining all wel- 
fare as the reward of virtue, all failure and misery as the 
punishment of offence against Deity, the Divine goodness 
consisting in rewarding the good and never sparing the guilty. 

When this solution was perceived to be too crude, it came 
to be held that the miseries of the good were sent for the 
testing and embellishment of their characters, while the pros- 
perity of the wicked was attributed to the kindness and long- 
suffering of God, who sought their repentance because, if 
they did not repent, He must ultimately destroy them. 
This was a noble conception of God’s ways with men, but 
it was necessary to distort many facts of life in order to fit 
them into it; and the good, being single-eyed, will ulti- 
mately observe facts. “laking the story of Job’s sorrows as 
a type of the misfortune common to nomad life, men 
naturally ask: If the character of Job was tested and 
ennobled by his afflictions, what effect had the proceedings 
of Satan, God’s agent, upon the characters of the Sabeans 
who stole his oxen and asses and slew their herdmen? 


PROVIDENCE AND MIRACLE 21 


What of the triumphant sin of the Chaldeans who stole his 
camels and slew their drivers? And what of the servants 
and sons and daughters who were slain? What reason 
have we to believe that their sudden deaths were either the 
fit reward of their sins or the consummation of their char- 
acters? ‘The drama of Job tells a story the like of which 
has happened a thousand times in the world’s history, and 
men have long recognised that the afflictions that may in- 
struct one strong soul commonly involve the crimes or mis- 
ery of others. The writer of that great drama was con- 
cerned only with the problem presented by his leading char- 
acter, and, wiser than many of his interpreters, he does not 
force the facts of inoffensive suffering into any theory that 
justifies God as the afflicter. He can only show the inade- 
quacy of the religious conceptions of his day and reiterate 
in his own way what all saints have said, that God can im- 
part Himself to those who seek even while their heart’s 
question remains unanswered. 

But the problem remains:—how can God, while able al- 
ways to intervene ‘easily by a nod,’ allow the faithful to 
call upon Him in vain? More than all else, it is the failure 
which so often meets the missionary efforts of the best men 
that refutes the doctrine that the sorrows and disappoint- 
ments of the good are always blessings in disguise. One 
large factor in their difficulty is precisely the Christian 
belief that when man is in distress it is useful to appeal for 
aid to the mercy of God. For the Christian especially, any 
satisfying conception of God must be in harmony with the 
teaching of Jesus of Nazareth concerning prayer. ‘Ask and 
ye shall receive,’ is the burden of all that Jesus said on the 
matter. 

There is a story of a good man who travelled into the 


22 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


then unknown north-west of Canada with an Indian tribe, 
and there taught them, developing all that was best in their 
own religion and imparting to them all that they could un- 
derstand of the Christian faithh He won their love, and 
they learned the simple arts of a cleaner civilisation. “There 
grew up in the wilderness a garden of which the noblest 
fruits were the Christian hearts of the Indian braves and the 
better condition of their wives and children. It all happened, 
as the missionary thought, as an answer to constant and trust- 
ing prayer. But then adversity came. Hostile tribes threat- 
ened; food supply failed. He sent messengers for help to 
the nearest towns, and no help was sent. A little thing— 
a very little thing—might have turned the scale of fortune 
as between war and peace, food or famine, help or neglect. 
But, alas! although constant in prayer, firm in belief that 
God would in some way save, this good missionary and his 
disciples were finally beaten down by the enemy, and the 
women and children were massacred or captured. Where 
the light of love and Christian truth had shined, darkness 
closed over. ‘The record of this man’s daily prayer and 
ceaseless faith, with the brief jottings of all that had come 
upon them, was found buried deep in the earth, and with it 
a New ‘Testament containing the boundless promises to 
faithful prayer. Whether this story be fact or fiction, is it 
not typical of religious tragedy? In the two thousand 
years since those promises were first proclaimed in Galilee, 
how many missionaries have thus worked and prayed and 
trusted, and fallen with the downfall of their life’s work! 
It is only of the successful mission that the world takes 
count, because it alone can commonly preserve its records. 
In the areas round the Mediterranean basin, how many 
countries that were once Christian have fallen or been driven 


PROVIDENCE AND MIRACLE 23 


back into the more ‘beastly ways’ of lower religions? ‘Tak- 
ing the north of Africa alone, the communities which pro- 
duced an Origen and an Athanasius, a Tertullian, a Cyprian, 
and an Augustine, must have arrived at no small degree of 
good living and sound thinking. There must have been 
many mothers like Monica: what of their prayer and faith? 
As early as the third century, councils of seventy and eighty 
African bishops met at Carthage. Can we suppose that 
these fathers in God failed to pray for the Church in their 
native lands? What befell? Must we affirm that the 
harem which has succeeded the domestic hearth of Christian 
families in those regions is as good in God’s sight? 

There was a good man recently connected with an Eng- 
lish-speaking university who had three promising boys. ‘The 
parents, as the result of some crisis in their affairs, became 
truly religious. That their sons should lead high-minded 
Christian lives was their greatest desire. It cannot, of 
course, be asserted, in any such case, that the training given 
by the parents was the wisest, or the environment the best; 
but the parents gave themselves to prayer for wisdom and 
for blessing on their sons, in which others, like-minded, 
joined them. All the sons went to the bad. ‘This is not a 
usual case—such effort is most frequently rewarded—but my 
point is that one such case disproves the easy belief that the 
disappointment of such parents was ordained of God for 
their good. However excellent the result on their own 
characters, it could not counterbalance the loss of character 
in the sons or the harm they did in the world. 

Another theory advanced to reconcile God’s power and 
goodness is that the counsels of God are so inscrutable that 
we cannot possibly know what is good and what is evil in 
His sight. It is therefore man’s highest duty to accept all 


24 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


things that take place as the will of God without complaint 
or question. ‘This, the Stoic virtue, is paganism in excelsis: 
it is also the religion of the good Muhammadan: it is not 
Christianity. ITrue Christians have always at heart rejected 
this fatalism, although often rendering it lip-service. For it 
is obvious that man can enter into no real relationship of 
prayer and faith and missionary endeavour with a God who 
may or may not approve of any human purpose, who may 
or may not respond to faithful prayer. 

The accumulated results of thought and observation have 
led multitudes to believe that if they are to preserve their 
faith in God’s goodness and mercy they must give up the 
belief that He can at all times intervene miraculously in 
human affairs. ‘Three further answers to our problem have 
been suggested, which all accept the limitation of Divine 
power. 

One of these assumes two orders in the universe—a nat- 
ural and a spiritual. The natural order, once started by 
God, spins on down its grooves of change without influence 
from on high, while God acts only in the world of spirit, 
and freely gives, to those who ask Him, ‘spiritual’ blessings. 
Two difficulties appear to face this easy answer. In the 
first place, the failure of missionary effort can hardly be 
called a spiritual blessing, even when it comes as the only 
apparent response to long and faithful prayer; for no mis- 
sionary with the spirit of Christ could suppose the refining 
of his own soul more important than the elevation of the 
multitude around him. But, in the second place, it com- 
mits us to a dualism entirely unchristian. For Christianity 
involves a belief in God immanent in man and in nature ~ 
as well as transcendent. This God is not a God who has 
wound up the universe like a clock and left it to go by itself. 


PROVIDENCE AND MIRACLE 25 


If God clothes the lily, if He fosters the whole creation 
groaning and travailing till it comes to triumphant sublima- 
tion, if God manifested Himself in human flesh, the order 
of nature cannot be exclusive of spirit. 

Again, it is now frequently maintained that God works 
miracles in the physical sphere, but will never coerce the 
free will of men; and all the suffering of life is held to be 
caused by the sinful choice of men. At first sight this seems 
a most helpful solution, but it cannot, so to say, be brought 
to face the music of the spheres. “In the beginning,” pain 
was born before sin. When the morning stars first sang 
together, the universe had become a system in which sentient 
choice could not be independent of physical conditions. To 
say that human free-will is the only limitation to God’s 
interference in nature does not solve our dilemma. ‘The 
doom of some of the highest efforts of man has often been 
sealed by a bad harvest or other natural catastrophe. Com- 
munities struck by famine or plague, by fire or flood, cannot 
make the same moral choice possible to them under normal 
conditions; and, however free we may hold ourselves to be, 
this same relation of physcial cause to spiritual effect is part 
of all our life. Either the material misfortunes which nec- 
essarily paralyse much good endeavour are the direct will of 
God and manifest His character, or His power of interfer- 
ence in lower nature, as well as in human will, must be 
limited. If self-limited, the limitation none the less holds 
good even against what we might call the wish or desire of 
God. For if God does not desire the spiritual welfare of 
every community in every time and place, He is not the 
Christian’s God. 

The last, and, as it seems to me, the only, answer which 
is consistent with the Christian revelation, is that God has 


26 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


chosen to work through nature, never performing His own 
will in spite of natural sequences, but taking upon Himself 
the whole burden of the universe that in some way emanates 
from Himself. Such a universe could not be mechanical, 
and must be thought of as in all its parts alive and inter- 
penetrated with spirit, but with spirit which is not God nor 
wholly in harmony with the transcendent Spirit of God. 
This spirit in nature—untamed but tameable—would be 
everywhere and in all things open in greater or less degree to 
the influence of God, manifesting His beauty. In this be- 
lief all things that have a material nature have, in their 
own degree, a spiritual nature; and these two natures are 
not two things but one thing, just as man—spirit and body 
—is not two but one. ‘The spirit that is in all things and 
attains personality in every man, is not God, but is open 
to the influence of God, and when yielded to that influence 
becomes the perfect agent of God. So that, although we 
may speak of God as immanent in man and in all things, 
and manifest when these are wholesome and good, yet all 
things are the object of His transcendent love, and He is 
the object of the love of all things and all men; lover and 
loved are not one but two. If God so loved the world as 
to give it part of His own freedom, seeking from it some 
better thing than could be got by compulsion, if He seeks 
to win and foster the highest by foregoing the right to inter- 
fere or compel, He may still be believed to be the loving 
all-Father revealed by Jesus Christ. If He is thus condi- 
tioned, He may still be believed to be responding by ways 
of His own to every sentient cry, although at times no out- 
ward sign can be given to show that He does not forsake 
His best beloved when their cause and His lies in the 
dust. 


PROVIDENCE AND MIRACLE 27 


With such a conception of God and His universe, prayer 
as taught by Jesus, in all its simplicity of childlike petition, 
would still be the breath of life; for nature, thus conceived, 
is no closed system of fixed habits or sequences; it is living 
and growing. But although we cannot at any time say 
what is possible or impossible, we are not environed chiefly 
by uncertainty; but so slow and orderly is develpoment that 
many things are always certainly possible, i.e., to be cal- 
culated on as proceeding from other relations of things. 
Science is the knowledge of all that is calculable and re- 
liable; it cannot deal with all that element in nature which 
is beyond. 

Here is a linnet perched upon a twig. Science is every 
day learning more things that are certain about linnets and 
twigs, but it cannot tell us to which side the bird will flit, 
to which spray its little feet will next cling. Some men of 
science may say that if they knew all about linnets and bushes 
they could certainly forecast all future flittings; but that 
assertion, resting upon no evidence, is not scientific. It is a 
theory—as much a matter of inference and interpretation of 
fact as any religious theory. 

Science can only know anything by abstracting certain 
aspects for examination. By this partial knowledge the 
world has gone forward to cleaner and easier conditions by 
leaps and bounds. But science can know nothing of the 
whole of anything, still less of the whole of all things. 

Christian faith constantly affirms that in reality spirit can- 
not be abstracted from matter, nor matter from spirit; that 
God, who must be able to know and do all that is possible, 
is concerned with the growth of the flower, the fall of the 
bird, and the cry of the child for food, no less than with the 
search of the soul for the unsearchable riches of His grace. 


28 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


It has also maintained that out of these riches, out of His 
own inexhaustible fund of joy, God, when He cannot con- 
sistently relieve His children, can amply compensate them 
for their temporal suffering. 

There are few chapters in Church history more moving 
than the record of the pioneer life of the Pilgrim Fathers 
upon the harsh New England coast; but out of their some- 
time failures and misfortunes and sometime successes grew 
the simple proverb, “God always answers in the letter or 
for the better.” This childlike jingle reflects the whole 
high Christian faith in petitional prayer, as the vast and 
splendid pageant of the morning is reflected in a drop of 
water that falls from the housewife’s bucket on the moss of 
the well. 

But to the observant and musing mind such a faith is 
impossible if it must be harmonised with the belief that 
God can at all times do anything that He will, ‘easily by a 
nod.’ 

For this reason it appears to be a misfortune that a group 
of young Anglican clergy, in many ways progressive, should 
be heading a revival of faith in miracle as thus defined: 
“This is indeed the only intelligible definition of miracle, 
viz., an act of God directly intervening in the natural or- 
der.” This group assert that God has performed and does 
perform, at certain times, marvellous acts, otherwise called 
‘special interventions,’ or ‘invasions of’ or ‘irruptions into 
the natural order.’ They do not, indeed, claim that God 
can do anything; the recognition of some limitations has long 
been part of the orthodox position; but they say that the chief 
proof of God’s activity in the world is “the irruptive action 
of God, such as orthodox Christianity believes to have taken 

*Canon Oliver Quick in The Pilgrim, Oct., 1920, p. 96. 


PROVIDENCE AND MIRACLE 29 


place at the Incarnation, and to be repeated (or perpetuated’) 
in the Sacramental system.’ 

But as we look about us we see that it is those who have 
themselves felt the power of God manifested in Christ and 
in the Sacraments who believe, in the orthodox sense, in 
the miraculous nature of the Incarnation or the Sacraments; 
and we suspect the real belief of such people to be based, not 
on their belief in miracle, but upon their religious experi- 
ence, which is incommunicable. On the other hand, to 
those who have not yet had this personal experience—and 
each generation in its childhood must belong to this ma- 
jority—this insistence upon the miraculous nature of Christ 
and of the Sacraments raises the problem of God’s non- 
interference in an acute form. As far as can be gathered, 
this group do not face the problem of Divine non-interven- 
tion; but it is to-day a more urgent question than ever, 
owing to the fact that the sense of justice and some knowl- 
edge of history are more widely diffused than ever before. 
Explicit or implicit in the world’s mind is this question: 
If God’s relation to us is such that at any time He could 
have miraculously inaugurated a new system of salva- 
tion, why were the ancient civilisations, one after the 
other, allowed to go down into the dust without this help? 
What of that brave and beautiful attempt to establish an 
ethical monotheism in ancient Egypt? What of the noble 
traits in the religion of Hammurabi, superseded by what 
was more base? In almost every country there is evidence 
of a period or periods in which a high religious ethic emerged 
only to be lost. Where was God’s ‘special intervention’? 
Or again, since Christ came, what of the millions of men 
and women who have been left without the miraculous help 


*Bishop Temple in The Oxford Magazine, Nov. 6, 1920. 


30 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


of the Christian Sacraments? Probably the advocates of 
miracle would at once reply that God sent the Christ in the 
earliest stage of human development in which His Gospel 
could be received. But if God waited upon the processes 
of development—the long processes of physical and spiritual 
development—before He manifested Himself in Christ, are 
we not bound to believe that He chose to condition His 
power to save men by these very processes of natural de- 
velopment? It is not going much further to believe that 
He always chooses thus to condition His power, and this is 
all that is maintained by those who deprecate the insistence 
upon miracle. The Church has gradually receded from the 
belief that God’s power of action is unlimited. ‘The actions 
of God, which by St Paul are likened to the potter’s arbi- 
trary control over the clay, are in the thought of Augustine 
and Aquinas represented as subservient to consistent purpose 
and the limitations of possibility. To maintain that God 
always works through the order of nature, including human 
nature (for man cannot be separated from nature), is thus 
a consistent development of orthodox doctrine. 

The contention, however, appears to be that unless God 
works miracles we should find it difficult to believe that 
He is active in the world, for without them we could never 
detect His working, or say how or when or where He 
worked. Put in simple language, it would seem to be 
urged that we could never believe God sent us our daily 
bread through bakers if He did not sometimes send it by 
a raven. The bulk of Christian experience cries out against 
this. Most religious people believe that what is good comes 
from God because they believe in God and not because they 
have first believed in miracles. But further, it must be 
pointed out that all that can be seen in a miracle is the 


PROVIDENCE AND MIRACLE 31 


result. God cannot be detected at work. We cannot say 
how any miracle is performed. If we could see a dead man 
raised to life, we. could not see God doing it, or be sure 
that some combination of natural processes could not have 
produced the result. ‘Those who would insist that the re- 
sult was a miracle would be insisting that nature is a closed 
system and adequately understood. 

That God should be universally invading the universe 
everywhere, at all times, with the constant pressure of His 
inspiration, seems to Canon Quick to be almost equivalent 
to cancelling the Divine action anywhere. In this connec- 
tion it may well be remembered that in the whole biological 
system there are no duplicates. Every living thing, vegeta- 
ble or animal, is a special and particular life. Any personal 
care that God bestows upon each must therefore, to meet 
the need, be special and particular. Our Lord, when He 
said that no sparrow fell to the ground without God, did 
not apparently mean that God exercised miraculous inter- 
vention, but that He did care for each individual sparrow. 
When God clothes the lilies He clothes each a little differ- 
ently. It is true that His way of acting in the matter would 
be somewhat difficult to detect, but a high faith says, and 
will always say, that everything of beauty is clothed with 
the beauty of God, while no one thing is like another. In 
human life this is far more obvious. Every soul has a 
different experience of God. To say that God is always 
speaking to all men is not to say that He is saying to each 
the same thing, or to deny that to each soul his word is 
different every hour. Faith must believe that God adapts 
Himself to each; that for each He has a separate revelation 
of Himself and a separate vocation; and for each, if the 
revelation is rejected and the vocation neglected, God must 


32 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


suffer a special and particular grief. It is only in very 
abstract and scientific thinking, such as is a good deal of 
the thought of orthodox theology, that a universal activity 
is conceived as a vast sameness. For example, when our 
Lord prayed that Peter’s faith might not fail, it would ap- 
pear that He asked for the particular help of God. But 
the particular help is not necessarily miraculous help. When 
St Paul thanked God for the way in which the Thessa- 
lonians had received his message, is it necessary to suppose 
that in thanking God for a special gift of grace he imagined 
that a miracle had been wrought, except in the sense in 
which all religious life is a miracle? 

The moral appeal of this advocacy of miracle is derived 
from the belief that without it God will come to be regarded 
rather as a Principle than a Personality. ‘““The obvious 
danger is lest God come to be conceived simply as a mean- 
ing, an explanation, an ideal, and nothing more; lest His 
existence cease to be thought of as substantive and concrete 
altogether, and appear merely as adjectival to the world of 
things, because we cannot realise substantive, concrete ex- 
istence except in terms of the particular and material.” ? In 
answer to this we would ask whether the writer of the 
twenty-third Psalm is describing the miraculous activities 
of God, or his own sense of God’s personal care in every 
detail of his common life? If he conceived of God in His 
saving activity as substantive and concrete, who taught him? 
Was it not God Himself? The constant cry that belief in 
God’s personal care will fade from the earth if some precise 
doctrine is not accepted, leaves us uninterested because of 
its radical unfaith in the power of God to reveal Himself 


* Canon Quick, op. cit., p. 104. Cf. definition of miracle quoted 
above, p. 36. 


PROVIDENCE AND MIRACLE 33 


to men whenever and wherever they lift up their souls. 
God is not passive or inert: what He teaches does not re- 
turn to Him void. If, as we believe, God has revealed Him- 
self in Christ, it is only God Himself stirring in men’s 
hearts who can teach the meaning and force of that revela- 
tion; and to insist that we know precisely how He will do 
this, and to assert that He can only do it in one way, is to 
have small idea of the resources of the living God. Person- 
ally, I believe that whatever is truth concerning God can- 
not fail from the earth, because I believe that the activity 
of self-revelation is of His essence. 

Finally, the view which I have tried to maintain does 
not deny any event which the Church has affirmed to be 
miraculous; it is the miraculous nature of the event it 
denies—miracle being defined as something independent of 
natural processes. Whether these events took place in fact 
or in reverent imagination is a separate question. We are 
so ignorant of the forces of life that no really liberal theolo- 
gian would claim to know all that is possible in any aspect 
of life. That claim is left to those who insist that certain 
events, if actual, must be miraculous. All that is main- 
tained by the liberal critics whom Canon Quick criticises is 
that, if Christ came in the likeness of God—if God be in- 
deed, in love and mercy, like Christ—then something other 
than God’s will or desire must prevent Him from effectively 
saving the world from all that is base and ugly and false, 
and that something must be the limitation of nature, because 
all religious experience goes to show that God is working in 
and through nature, including human nature. ‘That, for 
some high end, He manifests Himself only in our nature, 
is the very pith of the doctrine of the Incarnation. ‘That 
God suffers in all the evil that the process of development 


34 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


includes is the doctrine of the Cross. The old, pre-Christian 
faith in a God who at times breaks in and does all that He 
wills, has grown along with the higher faith, as tares grow 
up with wheat; but as tares and wheat grow together, the 
difference gradually becomes plain: the one will support life, 
the other will not. 

But the splendid ambiguity with which Canon Quick 
uses his word ‘intervention’ makes it very difficult to grasp. 
He says: “Every time we act voluntarily and freely at all 
we intervene in the order of natural events and thereby 
influence its subsequent course. “The doctrine of miracle 
asserts simply that God has acted in an analogous way.” ® 
In this sense of the word ‘intervention,’ everyone who ac- 
cepts the revelation of God in Christ believes that God with 
supreme power can do and does all good things that are 
possible in the sphere of life, and thereby is always influenc- 
ing its subsequent course. If man, being evil, knows how to 
give good gifts, how much more God! But how often does 
man know the agony of impotence to relieve or save! He 
stretches forth his hand, but in vain. He would give his 
life for the objects of his love, yet they sink before his eyes 
in physical or moral degeneration. ‘The whole course of 
human nature, the life of Jesus Christ—if this reveal God 
at all—reveal Him as taking upon Himself an analogous 
impotence, and waiting for the intelligent co-operation of 
men through whose understanding and zeal He can alone 
accomplish His will on earth. 

The analogy between God’s free action and man’s must 
be correct, or God could not have revealed Himself in the 
Divine Man. Man’s free action is strictly conditioned by 
the scheme of nature, and it is impossible to conceive of 

*Canon Quick, of. cit., p. 96. 


PROVIDENCE AND MIRACLE 35 


God both as good and doing whatever He will ‘easily by 
a nod.’ Man’s freedom reveals to us that God may always 
be acting freely, acting definitely in place and time, and 
yet be accepting the limitations of the nature in which 
He works. 

We may not believe in miracle, and yet believe in the 
Incarnation as a particular act of God at a definite time 
and place—an act made possible by many generations of 
Jews who had sought God’s friendship continually. Just 
because of the perfect co-operation of our Lord Jesus Christ 
with the Father, in intelligence and feeling and will, He 
was the supreme manifestation of the Divine activity on 
earth. 


ESSAY II 
Gop as EDUCATOR 


WE constantly speak of God as ‘Creator’ or as ‘Saviour.’ 
To speak of Him as the ‘Educator’ of man implies both 
these other aspects of His activity; for intelligent spirit is 
progressively created by education. We see this in the 
growing animal or child; each becomes at maturity what the 
education of its experience makes it. Intelligent spirit is 
also ‘saved’—in any sense in which we can understand salva- 
tion—by education; for education means the formation of 
ideal, purpose and habit. As long as these are wavering and 
unsound the soul is lost in the maze of its own futile im- 
pulses and lethargies. When these are fixed, true and 
healthy, the soul goes to its mark, like a well-aimed arrow. 

God’s activity as the educator of men began long before 
man existed. Human instincts, even human intelligence, 
had been gradually brought into existence by the education 
of countless generations of man’s animal ancestors. 

A friend of mine, who not long ago went out to lecture 
in the United States, was taken, in one of the large Ameri- 
can towns, to visit a magnificent museum. In this museum 
the whole process of biological evolution was set out by 
means of pictures and skeletons and casts of reconstructed 
animals, so that the student could see all the small multi- 
form changes which had taken place at intervals in the 
systems of birds and fishes and mammals, from the simpler 


36 


GOD AS EDUCATOR 37 


to the most complex forms, and also, where the changes had 
been important, paintings of the environment which had 
caused the change were supplied. He was told that it had 
been intended to bring the children of the elementary and 
secondary schools to this museum at frequent intervals for 
educative purposes, but that the political influence of the 
Roman Catholic Church was so strong that it had not been 
possible to make such visits a part of state education, the 
priests objecting that it would be subversive to the Catholic 
faith, When we hear a story like this we are disposed to 
feel superior, feeling sure that the faith we teach our young 
people is not founded on ignorance and does not need to 
be guarded from knowledge. But, unfortunately, there is 
still amongst us a large refusal to realise that we have no 
right to think of God, His character and activities, without 
including in our conception all that is involved in our 
knowledge of His method of creation. 

If it be true, as our Lord said, that not one sparrow falls 
‘without the Father,’ then we are bound to realise that of 
the teeming multitudes of lives in the countless generations 
of living things that went to the making of man, not one 
came into being, rejoiced and suffered and died, ‘without 
the Father.’ It is not our place here to ask why God could 
not have brought man into being ready-made, or by a 
method much less costly—to Himself as well as us. ‘There 
are many interesting things that might be said, wisely or 
unwisely, upon such a question; but our business is only 
with the facts as we know them, as seen in the light of the 
revelation of Jesus Christ. Truth is one; we must not 
separate one part of it from another. The Roman priest 
who wants to know of God only such truth as comes to us 
through the revelations of former ages when knowledge of 


38 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


fact was more limited than to-day, is building upon sand; 
hut so also is the scientist who looks for a revelation only 
‘hrough physical facts, and not through the rich religious 
experience of the race. ‘This points to the being and teach- 
ing of our Lord Jesus Christ as the end which justifies and 
explains a tremendous process which, apart from the spirit- 
ual insight He gives us, is seen only on the side of physical 
fact. 

We must always look to the finished work to explain the 
stages of its process; and looking to man, to the highest 
examples of humanity, and to our Lord Jesus Christ, we 
can see that in all the many changes of process, nature has 
set her seal of approval upon the qualities of Jove and 
reason. Wherever life has taken an upward step it has been 
by the greater exercise of love and intelligence. 

Biologists are discarding a purely mechanical explanation 
of the evolutionary process. It has only been where the 
demand of a new environment was met by some increasing 
adaptability, some fresh response, of living things that more 
complex development ensued. And again, the greater the 
development of parental love, the longer the offspring are 
kept beside the parents, the greater has been the increase 
of intelligence. What we call ‘instinct’ originated in a 
responsive effort, which, becoming habit, gradually came to 
be embedded in the subconscious mind of the race. It has 
only been by effort and enterprise, and then by obedience to 
the instinctive results of these, that the ‘life stuff,’ or mind 
out of which we are made, has learned anything. And all 
the time God has watched and waited for the development 
of these two qualities—love and reason. ‘They are not 
antagonistic, as many have supposed. “They are not on dif- 
ferent planes of existence. “The full development of one is 


GOD AS EDUCATOR 39 


impossible except as combined with the full development of 
the other. The lack of them means degeneracy. ‘The de- 
crease of either as the other develops means abnormality. 

If we take the dawning of love we gain some slight 
glimpse into the process of education. In the lower ranges 
of life we see that even normal parents, having taken much 
pains for the preservation of their young, can still see them 
destroyed without agitation. A rabbit will destroy her whole 
litter rather than allow a kindly keeper to inspect them, and 
a minute after she is eating clover with perfect unconcern. 
In contrast to this you get more highly-developed quadrupeds 
who will mourn with feverish intensity for forty-eight hours 
the loss of their young. But even in the early Stone Ages 
of man we find sepulchres in which the dead have been laid 
with implements and vessels of great value, for their use— 
the archeologists tell us—in another world. Here is love 
reaching out even beyond death. ‘Thousands of generations 
of sentient living things went to the upward lift involved 
in this limited progress; limited, for palzolithic man still 
seems to have devoured his human enemies. Perhaps at the 
nearest he lived twenty-five thousand years ago; and ever 
since then the increase in the power to love, both in the 
widening of the range of sympathy and the more intense 
quality of the intimate relations of life, has meant a greater 
sensitiveness both to joy and suffering, of millions and mil- 
lions of men and women in whose affliction God was af- 
flicted. In the evolutionary process sentient life learned 
quite early and easily to be greedy, to be fierce in its sex 
relations, to hate all things that interfered with appetitive 
pleasures, to hate implacably all racial enemies. War and 
cruelty were easily learned; but how slow and costly has 
been the learning of love! What, then, must be the delight 


40 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


of God when any one of us can love anything unselfishly! 
What joy must be His whenever we perform one disinter- 
ested act! If He has suffered so much in all the racial 
education that makes it possible for us to forgive our ene- 
mies, to bless them that hate us, to do good to them that 
despitefully use us, we may be quite certain that we have 
His whole strength with us whenever we make a step for- 
ward in the direction of fellowship and good temper and 
self-abnegation. 

No biologist now admits that a line can be drawn between 
human reason and animal intelligence in those cases in which 
animals adapt themselves to new circumstances, acting in 
ways that transcend the old adaptations that have become 
instinctive to their race. It is the wit that adapts powers 
already acquired in one environment to meeting the needs 
of another that has laboriously built up the higher intellec- 
tual functions. An elephant may have a larger brain than 
a man; primitive man may have as large a brain as a modern 
genius; but the nerve-processes involved in the labour of 
thought have been slowly and laboriously brought into use. 
The shallow superstition which belittles human reason in 
favour of what is called ‘spirituality’ refuses to face the facts 
of anthropological science, of human history and even of the 
history of religion. Reason is as yet the latest development 
in the long evolutionary process, and it is only when accom- 
panied by a high intellectual development that human re- 
ligion becomes humane, and the conception of God noble. 
If the long evolutionary process does not represent the 
purpose of God, then God is not our Creator; if it does 
represent His purpose, human reason must be most precious 
in His sight. Every exercise that man makes of it must 
give joy to God; the whole strength of God must be behind 


GOD AS EDUCATOR 41 


every effort to devote the power of thought to His 
service. 

We must thus learn from the facts of biological evolution 
that God is educating our souls for companionship with 
Himself by the development of Love and Reason. It is by 
the careful exercise of these that we can co-operate with 
Him and accelerate the process. His joy in us is deepened 
and increased by our diligent co-operation. In the life and 
teaching of Christ we learn how thus to co-operate. 

In that life we see a rhythm of three beats observed in 
the exercise of Love and Thought—the in-taking or re- 
ceiving; the rest; and the outflow or giving. I have not 
time to go into the detailed proof of this, but I believe it 
may be studied with profit. I will briefly sketch what I 
mean. | 

First, as to Love. How often we see a generous human 
life spoiled by a refusal to take generosity from others, a 
neglect of dependence upon God’s generosity, or by restless 
activity. Our Lord’s first use of love was to cause depend- 
ence upon His Father’s gifts, and acceptance of the love 
of His mother and His community. He was mature before 
He began the great outflow of His generous activity, and 
through it all He was eager to receive as well as to give. 
He called for devotion and sympathy. He accepted the 
personal service of the prostitute and the costly ointment of 
another devoted woman. Then, also, He observed periods 
of receiving strength from God, and—what is very impor- 
tant—He observed periods of rest. Just the same rhythm 
may be seen in His use of the function of thought. He 
absorbed all the teaching His Church could give, with its 
sacred books and Temple discussions. He studied nature, 
and pondered upon God’s relation to its processes. He re- 


42 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


ceived: He rested: He was not in haste to make up His 
mind. Yet behind the originality of His teaching what 
careful thinking lies! what vigour of active thought! To 
express a new philosophy of life in parable and aphorism 
is a great feat of intellectual genius. 

God’s relation to each of us personally is thus seen to 
be the continuance of His education of the race. He is 
educating each of us in the rhythmic activity of love and 
reason. ‘Lhe application of this to the special subject of 
health in mind and body is not far to seek. 

Second, the passions of hate and greed are always inimical 
to bodily health and mental poise, whereas all the emotions 
and impulses that arise from a balanced benevolence make 
for health. Again, intellectual sluggishness or restlessness 
or one-sided excess, impair bodily health and injure the com- 
munity. A diligent and wise use of all our mental powers 
in restful dependence upon God, in learning all that we can 
from others, and in critical effort to think out our own 
problems, is necessary to a wholesome life. We should seek 
to establish regular intervals for reception, rest and activity 
in our life of thought. 

Our attention is at this time being specially directed to 
one part of our mental life about which new discoveries are 
being made. God’s educative method may well be studied 
with particular reference to the recent knowledge we have 
acquired about the subconscious mind. In the transitional 
period during which the existence and powers of the sub- 
conscious mind are being discovered, wild theories concern- 
ing it have been advanced. ‘This has always been the case 
as regards all the forces of nature during our transition 
from ignorance to knowledge concerning them. Some have 
tried to teach us that by dipping into the subconscious mind 


GOD AS EDUCATOR 43 


we can become the masters of material wealth cr social 
position. It is represented as a magic lamp which brings 
the fulfilment of every desire. Others, more spiritually 
minded, have represented it as the region of pure spirit, in 
which, when we retired into it, we were sure of Divine 
inspiration. By these it is represented as the Holy of Holies. 

In reality, the powers of the subconscious mind are 
merely regulative of all those functions of body and mind 
which have been acquired by the race so long ago and so 
thoroughly as to have become unconscious in their opera- 
tion. The knowledge of the subconscious mind is only what 
the experience of the race has put into it, and what we each 
of us personally have put into it. It is nothing more nor 
less than this. We can learn, in the power of God, intelli- 
gently to educate our own share of the subconscious mind, 
so that it can rightly regulate our bodily and mental func- 
tions. This we can do only by maintaining our personal 
relation to God in fullest activity, constantly intent on the 
development of Reason and Love. 

Thus God’s education of man cannot be completed unless 
he prays. But he must pray in the right spirit and the right 
way. The old hymn says, “Prayer is the Christian’s vital 
breath.” Of prayer, however, there are different sorts, and 
but one sort is vital to our Christian life. There is the 
prayer of Stoic philosophy; the prayer of Mystery Religions; 
and the prayer of Christianity. 

The God of the Stoic is all-wise, almighty and inscrutable, 
immutable also and aloof from our emotions. ‘The only 
offering He accepts is a life of restrained virtue. ‘“What- 
ever is, is right”; hence petition is folly. Prayer consists in 
lifting up the soul in wordless adoration of Supreme Wis- 
dom and in complete resignation to all the ills of life. Such 


44 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


religion is very noble compared with irreligion; but it ap- 
pears nobler than it is. It is a sort of blasphemy, for it 
arraigns God for bringing humanity into the world with a 
misleading, unsatisfied nature. In Stoic prayer the natural 
desires and emotions must be kicked into a dark cellar and 
there locked down. 

Such a religion provokes, as a natural reaction, the prayer 
of the Oriental Mystery Religions, which suppresses the 
reason and gives rein to the instinctive emotions and desires. 
Such prayer presupposes a Saviour God, full of pity, offer- 
ing help in all human distress, concerned less for man’s 
righteousness than for his happiness here and _ hereafter. 
This sort of prayer alternates between adoration of the 
Supreme ‘Tenderness and petition covering every desire. 
But its condition is the suppression of the intellect. God’s 
Saving activities can only be fully drawn upon when the 
needy soul has learned by practice to make the mind vacant 
and receive what is desired in ecstatic realisation. This 
form of prayer is not developed by any exercise of the in- 
tellectual powers; but on the whole it may be more honour- 
ing to God than the Stoic prayer, because to conceive God 
as merciful and moved by prayer does not preclude faith 
in His wisdom; while to think of Him as wise and unmoved 
does preclude anything we can call love. Still this prayer 
also is a sort of blasphemy, for it arraigns God as deceiving 
man by bestowing on him a false light of intellect. 

The Stoic prayer comes to us from the pure and high 
philosophy and ethic of the Greco-Roman world. It is like 
a spring of cold mineral water falling from rocky heights: 
the world needs its medicine, but cannot live by it. It is 
the religion to-day of many ‘Christians,’ ethical, philosophi- 
cal and superior people. 


GOD AS EDUCATOR 45 


The prayer of the Oriental Mystery Religions comes to 
us from the uneducated masses of the teeming ancient world. 
It is like a flood rising in hot river valleys, making the food 
fields fertile, but bearing on its tide malodorous things and 
germs of disease. It is found to-day in Theosophy and 
Christian Science and New Thought and any Christian 
teaching that depreciates the intellectual life. 

But let us now turn to Christian prayer, and ask, what 
was the characteristic that made the Jewish religion so 
great among world religions? “That the Jewish religion was 
really very great we can see when we consider it both his- 
torically and religiously. Historically it contended with all 
the other religions in the Mediterranean Basin till in 
Christianity its ethics and literature dominated the whole 
field. Professor Burkitt, writing of the two centuries be- 
fore Christ came, speaks of “the great debt that even our 
modern world owes to the Jews for preserving elements of 
religion that were absent from the rather vulgar Hellenic 
ideas of the Seleucid Empire’; and adds that during this 
period ‘Judaism came to play an imperial part in the history 
of civilisation.” * Again, this Jewish piety formed an 
environment in which God could manifest Himself in the 
flesh—in the life of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. That 
same Jewish piety still gives to the religion of Christ its 
highest devotional literature, in the Psalms of the Old 
Testament. Now, what is the conquering force in the 
Jewish religion? ‘There is much in it that has appropriately 
perished, but what was its conquering element which our 
Lord took and blessed and gave, purified and strengthened, 
to Christendom? It was a way of prayer which combines 
what is best in both those kinds of prayer we have been 

* Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, p. 6. 


46 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


considering; but by exercising the whole nature—reason 
and emotion and strength of will or desire—in the prac- 
tice of prayer, the Jews obtained a fuller, better balanced 
religious life, and a truer idea of God. While the Jew 
possessed as lofty a monotheism as the noblest Stoic, and 
a pure ethic; while he conceived God as personal, merci- 
ful and helpful as were the Saviour Gods of the Mystery 
cults, he also conceived God as having formed the intellect 
and emotions of man for Himself and in His own likeness, 
so that understanding friendship could exist between the 
least and most miserable of men and Almighty God. In all 
the examples of our Lord Christ’s converse with His Father 
we see that He spoke from His conscious understanding as 
to a Father who could understand His thoughts. In all 
that He taught about prayer He taught men to speak to 
God with conscious understanding, making reasonable peti- 
tions, telling their griefs and giving thanks. It is thus that 
men become wholesomely religious, because the whole 
nature—feeling, intellect and will—is exercised in the 
highest duty of life. 

A writer in The New Statesman recently deplored the 
modern depreciation of reason, saying that such depreciation 
had always been a symptom of a degenerate age. ‘This is 
terribly true. The more necessary, then, is it that we should 
all learn more and more of the craft of true Christian 
prayer, for the Stoic neglect of simple petition and natural 
emotion will always provoke into existence magical cults in 
which reason is suppressed. ‘The prayer of understanding 
is the vital breath of the soul. 


ESSAY III 
ForcIVENESS—HUMAN AND DIVINE 


‘FORGIVENESS’ is a word more ambiguous than we commonly 
recognise. “There were two boys in a certain school—one 
whom the headmaster specially liked, and one whom he 
specially disliked. One day they got into mischief together, 
and were brought before him for punishment. The master 
felt resentful and angry toward the boy he disliked; he 
thought he had led the other into mischief; but he could 
not, in justice, punish one without punishing both. So, after 
lecturing them a little, he said: “I will forgive you both 
this time; do not do it again.” But he continued to feel 
resentful and angry toward the elder boy. Was the re- 
mission of the penalty forgiveness? You will say at once, 
“No; as long as he felt resentful and angry toward the elder 
boy he did not forgive him.” A neighbour of mine, in a 
large business, discovered that his book-keeper had been de- 
frauding him, taking the firm’s money by falsifying the 
accounts. He was persuaded, for various reasons, not to 
prosecute the man, and that was called ‘forgiveness.’ He 
went about saying, in private, “I have forgiven him, because 
on the whole it seemed the best thing to do; but he is a 
thoroughly dishonest fellow and I shall have nothing more 
to do with him.” ‘hat is a kind of thing that is constantly 
called ‘Forgiveness’ in common talk; and in so far as our 
notion of morality is legal, in so far as we think of right 
47 


48 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


action as that which merits reward, and wrong action 
as that’ which merits punishment, this use of the word 
will appeal to us. ‘The Roman nation were a legally-minded 
people: forgiveness to them meant ‘remission of punishment.’ 
They were not concerned about the heart or mind of the 
wronged person. ‘Their conception of a righteous, or just, 
person was exactly the same as their conception of a right- 
eous or a just law. ‘They thought of both persons and 
morality in legal terms. The Hebrews were also a legally- 
minded people. ‘The law of God was for them like an 
emanation of the Divine Spirit: it mediated God to them. 
But both in the Latin nation and in the Hebrew nation 
there were poets and prophets who saw that life cannot be 
reckoned up or explained in terms of a moral law. In the 
highest form of goodness, in the highest form of righteous- 
ness, there is something that is deeper and wider than any 
conception of legal goodness or legal guilt. 

Consider for a moment the case of a mother whose son 
is a renegade. He has gone to a distant country. She has 
no means of reaching him even by letter. She hears from 
time to time of his ill-deeds. She knows that he is taking, 
bit by bit, the capital that ought to support his family, and 
wasting it upon immoral pleasures. But, being a mother, 
she loves him tenderly, and by prayer, by every influence 
she can indirectly bring to bear upon him, she is seeking to 
bring him to the right path. He is always upon her mind. 
She is always devising plans to help him to reform. As far 
as it is possible, she is always thinking of those palliating 
circumstances which make his behaviour more excusable. 
When she is speaking even with the utmost candour of his 
crimes she never refers to them in the way other people do, 
but tries to show how and why he is tempted, how and why 


FORGIVENESS 49 


it is that he does not resist the temptation. She never thinks 
of him as bad to the core; but always believes that when 
he comes to himself, when his true self prevails, he will 
reform. Bitterly wronged as she has been, and constantly 
is, by her wicked son, she as constantly and always forgives 
him. It is a matter of course, because it is a part of her 
love. 

We all recognise this as the true forgiveness. There is 
no remission of penalty. We can see this clearly because 
in this case she is not in a position to impose any penalty. 
She cannot even act towards him with a reserved or re- 
proachful manner. We must see that if this is the true 
meaning of forgiveness, the remission of penalty is no part 
of its true meaning. Remission of penalty may, or may 
not, accompany forgiveness. It is very often the result of 
forgiveness; and because it is a dramatic, or very obvious 
result, the unthinking, popular mind, which is the great 
maker of language, has taken the word ‘forgiveness’ either 
to have both meanings or to mean only ‘remission of penalty.’ 

Forgiveness in its true meaning, which I have illustrated 
by the case of the mother and her renegade son, is something 
that is very familiar to us all. How many a drunkard’s 
wife; how many a wife whose husband’s sins are more dis- 
tressing and less respectable even than drunkenness; how 
many a husband of a silly or extravagant or selfish wife; 
how many a parent of undutiful children, have we known 
who forgave in this way! But there is a distinction to be 
made here between people who seem to be thus forgiving. 
Some wives, some husbands, some parents, some friends, 
overlook the really immoral tendencies and actions of the 
people who belong to them, because they themselves have 
no very clear notion of right and wrong and do not think 


50 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


it of great importance. Now, clearly, in their case, if it 
can be said to be forgiveness at all, it is a very superficial 
kind of forgiveness. We cannot forgive where we are not 
wronged unless we so identify ourselves with the right that 
any breach of it in our dear ones hurts us personally. We 
cannot forgive in these cases, for we have nothing to for- 
give. [his is a point worth dwelling on for a moment. 
People often excuse themselves for not forgiving because 
they have been so deeply hurt or wronged. How often has 
it been said in all good faith of late, ““We cannot be ex- 
pected to forgive the Germans when we remember what they 
have done.” We need to remember it is only the fact that 
people have done wrong that makes it possible to forgive 
them. 

If you were familiar with a very beautiful vase in a 
public museum, and your son or daughter or friend care- 
lessly broke it, how you would suffer. If no one else knew 
who did it, if public opinion was not roused and no penalty 
inflicted, yet the loss of the beauty would hurt you. It 
would be hard to forgive, yet if you truly loved the offender 
you would forgive his careless indifference to the vase. 

The point I want to make here is that if you were one 
of that large mass of common people who did not realise 
that the vase as a work of art was unique, and did not ap- 
preciate its delicate and exquisite beauty, but thought merely 
of the money value lost, you would have nothing, or very 
little, to forgive. Your forgiveness might be measured by 
what it would cost you to buy another vase as like as 
possible to the first. The depth and value of your forgive- 
ness would be in exact proportion to your appreciation of 
the beauty of the thing that was broken. We thus see that 
it is in proportion to the insight one has into the intrinsic 


FORGIVENESS 5t 


beauty of goodness that one’s forgiveness of any breach of - 
it will count—will be of value. 

There is another class of instances where people seem to 
be forgiving and are only superficially so. If a person has 
not much capacity for love; if he or she does not really care 
for the improvement of the character of the person who is 
doing wrong, his forgiveness of that wrong will cost him 
little and will be superficial. 

Let us, then, sum up so far. ‘True forgiveness, as we 
know it in human experience, has no necessary connection 
with the remission of punishment, and the depth and power 
of forgiveness depends on the depth and power of the love 
of the forgiving soul toward the offender, together with the 
insight of that soul into the ideal of beauty and goodness 
and truth which has been violated. 

We must be careful to notice that true forgiveness is 
exactly the same in its nature whether it be exercised in the 
case of a great wrong or a very little one. While it is true 
that forgiveness of a great wrong will always be given at 
great cost, little wrongs can be forgiven very cheerfully, 
because we must remember that forgiveness is true in pro- 
portion to the depth of the love in the person who forgives; 
and love, hoping all things, believing all things, is confident 
that the offender will respond and reform. When we say 
the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us as we forgive,” we are 
bound to ask ourselves, how do we forgive? If the injury 
be a serious one, many of us do not forgive at all. We have 
not sufficient depth of love and of the hope that is born of 
love. But we do forgive, quite constantly and habitually, 
little failings and stupidities in those we like. We love 
them and go on trusting them in spite of these. Our 
pleasure in them and kindness to them does not vary be- 


52 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


cause of their misdemeanours. The greatest need of human 
beings is the need of each other, and that is why, when any 
two people satisfy each other, forgiveness is a matter of 
course. 

Forgiveness is, indeed, a necessary element in every 
friendship—though it is never the most important element. 
This is true of friendships between brother and brother, 
friend and friend, but especially is it true between parent 
and child. In any case, when the friendship is between 
superior and inferior, forgiveness will be a constant and 
natural action of the superior; that is to say, all faults of 
taste, negligencies, ignorances and ill-tempers, on the part 
of the inferior or less-disciplined character, will be forgiven 
with generous forbearance and quickly forgotten, except 
in so far as the influence of the superior is directed toward 
their correction. 

While, then, it is true, as we have seen, that forgiveness 
must be inspired by real love for the offender, and is genuine 
in proportion to the vision of the ideal which the wrong 
violates, it is also true that love cannot fail to inspire for- 
giveness: just in so far as we truly love, we forgive naturally 
and habitually; and further, the vision of the ideal of right 
is the fruit of a spiritual insight which will be quick to see 
the good as well as the evil in the offender, his possibilities 
of amendment as clearly as the ugliness of his fault. 

If, then, we are agreed that this is a true account of 
human forgiveness, does it help us to know anything about 
the forgiveness of God? What do we know about God? 
The scientists will, of course, tell us that by the methods 
by which we attain scientific knowledge we cannot reach 
the knowledge of God. The philosophers will tell us that 
we have a choice; we can either believe that human intel- 


FORGIVENESS 53 


lect, human aspiration, human heroism, has happened by 
mere chance in a material universe for which no spiritual 
source need be assumed, or we can believe that what we find 
best in human life is the proof that somewhat of the same 
kind, but greater, inspires the universe. It is as if when 
we see a river running to the sea, we could equally well be- 
lieve that the water was in some way a by-product of rocks 
and earth, as that at its source and all along its track it was 
fed by water of the same sort that we now see running be- 
tween its banks. We feel that in this case there is no real 
alternative: we must infer that the river was fed by the 
rain. And I personally find it harder to believe that the 
river of human aspirations and disinterested virtues is a 
chance product of a different order of things, the product 
of a material process, than that it derives from a source 
whose nature and properties it still possesses, and that it is 
fed all along its course by a continual in-flow of the spiritual 
power from which it came. | 

If, then, we accept a belief in God, the inference is 
reasonable that we—however imperfectly we reflect Him— 
are of the same nature; for man, as the highest product of 
the biological system, must be more nearly allied to the 
mind of its Author than is any inferior product. We have 
then some reason to believe that what we know of our own 
nature which is summed up in what we call personality, 
gives us the best glimpse we can obtain of the nature of God. 
The other source of our information is the experience and 
teaching of such of our race as have been endowed with re- 
ligious genius. Great philosophers, great poets, great 
prophets, who have turned the strongest mental telescopes 
that human beings have ever possessed upon the ultimate 
problems of thought, have given us the mature convictions 


54 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


at which they arrive upon the nature of God. “Those whom 
we recognise as our great teachers tell us that God is the 
origin and sustainer of all things; that He loves goodness 
and hates iniquity. Now, love and hate can only inhere in 
personality. “The words have no meaning for us except as 
an activity of personality. “Ihe love of good, the hatred 
of iniquity, cannot hang in the air. ‘They cannot be mere 
vibrations of light or of sound. ‘The words have no mean- 
ing for us except as they represent an energy of personality. 
We have arrived, then, by two ways—the way of inference 
from our own nature, and the convictions of religious 
genius—at the belief that personality, righteous personality, 
must be at least a part, or an attribute, of the Divine 
nature. 

Most of us believe that the greatest religious genius that 
ever lived in the world was Jesus Christ; let us, then, 
briefly consider what it was that He taught us about the 
forgiveness of God, how far we can accept that teaching, 
and what relation it bears to what we know of human 
forgiveness, 

Jesus teaches us to argue from human love to Divine 
love. “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts 
to your children, how much more shall your Father which 
is in heaven give good things to them that ask him.” ‘That 
is a very important point. Jesus Christ frankly recognised, 
what all philosophers know, that the attributes of the human 
mind or soul are the greatest things we have acquaintance 
with, that we can only get any idea of the infinite good by 
gazing at the highest good we know, and saying, how much 
more must this be true of God.” ‘That is what Jesus said 
all the time. If the imperfect parent loves, gives and for- 
gives, how much more God! In the parable of the Unjust 


FORGIVENESS 55 


Judge, in the parable of the man who asked bread of his 
neighbour by night, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, the 
argument is always the same—if human love at its worst 
and at its best is generous, how much more will God be 
generous ! 

Unfortunately the best and most essential thing in what 
Jesus taught about God’s forgiveness has been veiled and 
overlaid by the fact that in the Gospels, as we have them, 
there are a certain number of passages of a contrary tenor. 
These passages, I am convinced, do not belong to the 
original teaching of Jesus. 

Of the genuineness of sayings attributed to Christ there 
are four main tests, no one of which would be decisive if 
applied alone, but which, when they all point in the same 
direction, have great weight. 


1. Consistency —If+we find two passages afliirming ideas 
directly contradicting each other, we have, so far, reason 
to suspect that one or the other does not express the mind 


of Christ. 


2. Originality—Whatever in the Gospels is found also 
in the current Jewish literature of the age was, of course, 
not originated by Jesus. It follows that ideas in the Gospels 
which differ from the mind of the age are more likely to 
belong to the mind of Jesus. 


3. Comparative date—If we find that a certain idea is 
either completely absent from the oldest documents, or only 
very slightly hinted at in these, but that it becomes more 
and more emphatic with each later version of the Gospel 
story, we have a right to suspect that the idea was not 
integral to the original teaching of Jesus, but was read into 
it by the mind of the early Church. 


56 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


4. Style——There are many passages in the Gospels which, 
translated into any language, stand out as gems of literary 
style. Profound thought is expressed with perfect clearness 
and in exquisitely poetic imagery. There is not a word too 
little or a word too much. ‘That is one mark of genius: it 
is a clear characteristic of the genius of Jesus. Passages 
that show this literary quality are more likely to belong to 
the original teaching of Jesus than passages that, in com- 
parison, are wordy and weak. 

No one of these tests is by itself conclusive; but when all 
four, or when two or three of them, are satisfied—or fail 
to be satisfied—in the case of any given passage or saying, 
we reach results which may fairly claim to be established 
on objective critical grounds. 

This has been worked out in detail by Mr. Emmet in 
The Lord of Thought. The conclusion reached is that 
though Christ constantly emphasised the terrible conse- 
quences of wrongdoing, He never taught that those con- 
sequences were punishments directly inflicted by God. 

We must beware of confusing consequence with punish- 
ment or reward. A mother lights a fire and her children 
are warm; that is a case of consequence, not reward. A 
child falls against the fire and is burned; that is a case of 
consequence, not punishment. Punishment is a human 
method of education and government, and its very essence 
is its relation to individual desert. In nature we see no 
sign of punishment; we see cause and effect working out 
over a large field, but it is a working of cause and effect 
which does not adapt itself to individual desert. 

If the laws of Nature are any expression of the purpose 


*The Lord of Thought, by L. Dougall and C. W. Emmet (Stu- 
dent Christian Movement, 1922). 


FORGIVENESS 57 


of God, God does not punish. But because punishment is 
not that purpose, it by no means follows that the Reign of 
Law is without a moral purpose. On the contrary, we can 
readily see how God has a special purpose in giving man a 
home in a moving universe that does not adapt itself to 
him. Intelligence can only develop in an environment of 
fixed habits, an environment in which the same effect fol- 
lows the same cause with regular sequence. Suppose that a 
little boy should live in a nursery where he could sometimes 
put his hand in the fire without being burned, where he 
could sometimes fall out of the window without damage, 
where he could sometimes beat the baby with the poker to 
the baby’s delight, where, as often as not, he would be re- 
warded for the worst behaviour and punished for the best. 
How could he become intelligent? It is by the exercise of 
foresight that the mind grows strong. In a mad, or—what 
is the same thing—in a constantly miraculous, world, it 
would be impossible to foresee the result of anything. But 
in a world of regular causation man can and does became 
intelligent. If, then, God’s purpose in our creation is to 
bring forth intelligent or rational minds that can approach 
Him as children a father, we can see why they must live 
in a system or ordered causation such as is our natural 
environment, 

This moral purpose becomes easier to grasp if we accept 
the specifically Christian idea that God, having set His 
creatures in this hard and dangerous school of nature, goes 
through the school with them. The sparrows fall—yes, in 
thousands, and often by man’s cruely—but not one that is 
not attended and cared for in its death by the holy power of 
God. God does not intervene to hinder calamity to the 
sparrow, but He does something. What does He do? We 


58 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


do not know; but Jesus, with the insight of religious genius, 
tells us that God does something adequate to the sparrow’s 
need. Jesus showed forth God to men. He wept with men. 
He suffered injustice with men. He dies in lingering agony 
with men. In affirming that in all this He was exhibiting 
the character of God, Christianity affirms that God, going 
through the hard school with us, must have some great end 
to justify so expensive an education. ‘The love that induces 
Him to be afflicted in all our afflictions must cause Him to 
do something adequate to our every need. His activity in 
nature is limited by the method of creation which He has 
chosen. His activity in our minds is limited by our unreadi- 
ness to learn His will and do it. I do not believe that if 
we perfectly co-operated with God He would save us from 
every misfortune: He did not intervene to save Jesus 
Christ: but I do believe that He would so adjust us to our 
environment that we should suffer no calamity that would 
not be transformed into a far greater good. 


ESSAY IV 


THe WorsHie oF WRATH 


Written August 1923 


THERE is a scoffer in our midst. He has said that the 
present action of France toward Germany is in full accord- 
ance with the Christian conception of the Divine treatment 
of the unrepentant, and therefore, as moral ideals have their 
root in religion, it is futile for Christian preachers to take 
part in propaganda to end war. Our militarists, who sym- 
pathise with France even though they may question the 
efficacy of her method in the Ruhr, will no doubt agree that 
to ‘rule’ the unrepentant ‘with a rod of iron’ and ‘break 
them in pieces like a potter’s vessel’ is a Christian ideal 
—indeed, do not all Anglican Christians chant together 
that conception of goodness every Easter Sunday? On the 
other hand the more thoughtful class of British Christians, 
who regard the French treatment of a fallen foe as a na- 
tional sin, are roused to incredulous anger by the scoffer’s 
taunt. It may be worth while, however, to consider what . 
percentage of truth lies in it. 

For the purpose of discussion, we may assume that the 
French demand from Germany a servile acknowledgment 
of guilty inferiority, full restitution, and pledges of com- 
plete amenableness. Failing to obtain all this, their inten- 
tion is punitive. In likening the orthodox belief in God’s 
wrath to this procedure, let us remember that the two cases 

59 


60 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


are alike concerned with unrepentant, not repentant, sinners. 
The French action is based on the, probably correct, belief 
that Germany is unrepentant. 

Our scoffer would admit, no doubt, that the humanitarian 
element in Hebrew and Christian religion all down the 
centuries has slowly, though not steadily, gained in emphasis, 
and the strain of barbaric hostility to obstinate sinners has 
been losing in emphasis until, in their highest moments, men 
of most orthodox mood have relegated it to a subordinate 
place. Wrath, say they, in the activity of God is subordinate 
to love, and punishment is the servant of love. The desire 
of hearts rendered both righteous and kindly by centuries of 
humanitarian development is to minimise the doctrine of 
God’s retributive wrath in two ways: by the generous hope 
that the unrepentant may ultimately prove to be very few, 
and by the enlargement of Limbo (as in recent Roman 
Catholic theology) on the ground of the limitation of human 
responsibility—invincible ignorance being made to cover a 
multitude of obstinacies. But the principle remains the same. 
God is believed of set purpose to hurt the unrepentant sin- 
ner, not for his good, but when that is past praying for. 
Mr. Edwyn Bevan, in the Quarterly Review for April 1923, 
strenuously upholds this view; he says: “Just as in human 
anger there is a desire to bring together wrongdoing and 
suffering, so in God’s anger there must be the will that the 
connection should exist” (p. 306). 

In the Church Quarterly of April 1923 there is a kindlier 
reiteration, by Dr Goudge, of the same principle. “All will 
sympathise with the desire to deny that God is in any sense 
the author of any pain that does not purify; all, if only 
conscience and the facts would allow it, would like to deny 
that, strictly speaking, there is such a thing as retribution. 


THE WORSHIP OF WRATH 61 


But they will not allow it. The two ideas of retribution 
and chastisement, though distinct in thought, are inseparable 
in practice” (pp. 155-156). The italics are mine. 

Thus, in the most recent expressions of Christian 
orthodoxy and morality, we see wrath against unrepentant 
sinners and the act of hurting them exalted as the attribute 
and action of God, and therefore to be praised. A Divine 
ideal is always one on which human character and conduct 
are to be consciously, and more largely unconsciously, 
formed, 

So far, then, our scoffer has some justification. The 
amount of retributive suffering due to any unworthy and 
unrepented conduct, and the question of the right agent and 
right method of its infliction, are matters for human de- 
cision: the ideal remains unchallenged. The emotion of 
anger is sanctified; and we all know what sort of justice we 
may expect from the angry. 

All moral treatises, all legislation, have been largely 
concerned in regulating the human application of this retribu- 
tive ideal which is called ‘justice.’ Our scoffer at Christian- 
ity does not deny that; what he says is that as long as the 
best men teach that the punishment of bad conduct is God’s 
way of dealing with bad conduct, men will hold that it is 
the ideally good way, and as the chastiser and the unre- 
pentant sufferer never agree as to the quality of the conduct 
in question or the degree of retribution that can rightfully 
be demanded, there will be, between men and nations, con- 
stant war. The strong will always punish the weak, and 
the weak—or if they are slain, their sympathisers—will bide 
their time, nourish their own sense of rightful retribution, 
and hit back as soon as convenient. It is of the very nature 
of unrepentance to resent any punishment and to retaliate. 


62 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


If, then, the infliction of punishment on the unrepentant is 
a high and holy ideal, to be worshipped in God and imitated 
by men, are we not condemned to warfare as long as earth 
shall last ? 

Our religious moralists tell us that it is certain that all 
religion and morality depend on the belief that God’s puni- 
tive wrath is visited on sinners, and therefore, they argue, 
there must be some way of so educating the human con- 
science that men and nations will arrive at so unanimous a 
notion of what is and is not bad in conduct, what is and is 
not just retribution, that only the wilfully blind criminal— 
be it man or nation—will refuse to recogrise the justice of 
such punishment as may be meted out by. men or God. 
(‘Wilfully blind’—that is a pet phrase of moral and re- 
ligious writers.) But let us note that this hope is based 
wholly on the belief that punitive wrath toward the unre- 
pentant is actually an element in ideal good or God. ‘To the 
impartial observer there is no adequate evidence that 
‘righteous anger’ will ever stimulate conduct that all but 
the wilfully blind must admire. ‘The belief that ‘righteous 
anger’ is an element in the Divine character would appear 
to rest on the assumption that it is a purely good emotion, 
and not, as modern analysis suggests, compounded of two 
emotions—a beautiful and true antipathy to wrongdoing, 
and a primitive and misdirected enthusiasm for punishment 
as its antidote. If this be so, the hope that the world will 
one day be emparadised by an ideal exercise of punitive 
wrath vanishes and leaves not a wrack behind. 

The scoffer who blames the ideal of justice as preached 
by Christians for the behaviour of France toward Germany, 
sneers at the traditional method of our religious reasoning. 
Is there not justification for this sneer? Do we not adhere 


THE WORSHIP OF WRATH 63 


to the agelong habit of attributing to God our clumsy best 
in ideal and practice without any suspicion that our best 
is a compound of good and evil? 

Consider the primitive animistic tribe, with its custom 
or standard of behaviour or morals. ‘The sacredness of 
this standard is necessary to the very existence of the tribe. 
It binds it together so that all the arts of war and peace 
may go on within it smoothly and without interruption. 
To violate customary behaviour, to break the taboo with 
impunity, is a deadly sin. It is a development of the prac- 
tice of the herd—its instinctive method of self-defense. The 
stag chased by the hunters, and escaping, creeps back at 
evening under green covert and, drawing deep sighs of 
exhaustion, seeks protection from its fellows; yet it is im- 
mediately done to death by their horns. The well-being 
of the herd depends on common movement. ‘The culprit 
has separated itself or been separated: is it guilty? ‘They 
do not ask! So in the animistic human tribe the breaker 
of custom is slain or sent forth into the pathless wilderness 
without means of life. Is he guilty? His motive may be 
self-indulgence, or it may be some intuitive perception that 
the taboo is absurb or detrimental to the tribe; but criminal 
and reformer suffer alike. The conscience of the whole 
tribe is uneasy till each is punished. ‘The human herd has 
greater powers of understanding than the brute, and it 
might perhaps inquire into the distinction between reformer 
and criminal were it not that it identifies its taboo and puni- 
tive action with the object of its worship. The very ques- 
tion becomes an irreligious act. The herd does not attribute 
its justice to the will of God: the tribe does. 

The story of looting Achan illustrates the same thing in 
a later polytheistic and national stage. It was necessary if 


64 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


the allied tribes were to make a combined conquest that 
individual warriors should not be led aside from pursuit of 
the common end by the hope of individual gain. With in- 
stinctive wisdom the nation was called together to vow that 
the spoil should be offered, in holy destruction, to Jehovah. 
Yet Jericho was full of beautiful objects. The art of 
Canaan was highly developed. Achan stole a beautiful 
garment and money and a wedge of gold. Alas! he was 
led away to a neighbouring valley—he and his sons and his 
daughters, his oxen and his asses, his sheep and goods. 
How drear the procession! All Israel stoned them with 
stones. We can see them huddled together in despair till 
they were bruised and crushed to death. ‘Then they were 
denied burial: they were burned with fire. There is much 
tU. be said for the punishment. It was necessary to deter 
other warriors from private loot; and Westermarck has 
shown us—what the common sense of primitive man dis- 
covered—that for merely deterrent purposes the sacrifice of 
the criminal’s family along with him can be justified in the 
interests of the community. It would certainly secure a 
strong domestic influence on the side of law-keeping! ‘This 
sort of justice was probably the best that the leaders of 
Israel could devise; but to attribute it to God—that appears 
to us to-day a mistake. Let us mark that in the case of 
Achan the popular conscience, the sense of right and justice 
in the common man, was in entire accord with the punish- 
ment—‘“All Israel stoned them with stones.” 

We have it on high authority that the same nation, in 
later development, stoned its reforming prophets. This was 
a natural consequence of attributing their customs to God; 
no established custom might be criticised. It was not pe- 
culiar to the Hebrews. No doubt they began the murderous 


THE WORSHIP OF WRATH 65 


process—as did the Athenians in the case of Socrates—by 
jeering. ‘The first stones thrown at reformers are always 
jeers taken from the brook of the plain man’s sense of pro- 
priety. ‘There is much to be said for the condemnation of 
the unrepentant Socrates in the name of the gods—for did 
he not seek to unsettle the common mind? It was, perhaps, 
the best of which the majority of judges in that epoch were 
capable. The good, honest, God-fearing fellow in the streets 
regarded the philosopher as a victim of divine wrath. But 
the real God—what of Him? 

Consider, again, the story of Ananias and Sapphira his 
wife. Whether fact or fable, their destruction certainly 
shows an ideal of Divine justice common in the early times 
of Christendom. It was very hard on these two. How 
many of us have declared to God and men and to ourselves 
that we have given all we could to the Church when, after 
all, we had something more to give? ‘The blinding of 
Elymas the Sorcerer—that also was severe and held to be a 
work of God. We have, in fact, been busy with this work 
of piously hurting our fellows for the good of themselves 
or of the community for some four thousand years. Of 
course we plume ourselves on possessing more insight now 
into God’s heart of grace, especially of late years, for it is 
scarce a century and a half since, in accordance with the 
common conscience, we hanged a mother of hungry children 
for stealing a loaf. But while we recognise that our fore- 
fathers, though doing their best at government, were wrong 
in attributing their punitive moral ideals to God, we have 
not ceased to attribute our own punitive moral ideals to 
God. We are still told that the justification of Divine 
punishments is to be found in the popular conscience—the 
conscience first formed by doctrine and then appealed to by 


66 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


the doctrinaires! We are still told that because we have 
found no better way of government than by threats and 
penalties, God must be as resourceless. So much for our 
reasoning. 

The scoffer also finds colour for his taunt in our defective 
theological science—for I take it that to observe facts, to 
form a hypothesis, and again to test this hypothesis by ob- 
servation, is science of a sort. But how partial our obser- 
vation has been is shown by the astounding fact that Chris- 
tian theologians assert that life shows sin to be followed by 
punishment. ‘The tradition comes down, as Professor Ken- 
nett has pointed out, from the time when the Hebrews, like 
the modern Hindoos, believed that if a man suffered he must 
have sinned. We do not prove now the relation of sin to 
suffering by assuming the cause when we see what we believe 
to be an effect; but we have not had the wit to perceive 
that without the assumption there is no evidence. Yet the 
sociologist knows that if men rise in the scale of love of the 
beautiful, the true, and the good, their capacity both for 
joy and suffering increases. If they descend by increasing 
worship of herd or self, and are moved only by herd interest 
or self-interest, they become insensible, first, to any pain 
but their own—a great relief that—and, on the whole, 
dulled to those issues of life which involve any keen sense 
of the distinction between joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure. 
Our actual experience of life shows that a selfish person, 
be he sensualist or rogue, inflicts far greater pain upon his 
family and the community than he is capable of suffering. 
So clear is this to some of our theologians, so obvious is it 
that the wicked often flourish, that the ground of their 
argument has been shifted. It is often now admitted that 
the only retributive punishment of unrepented sin to be 


THE WORSHIP OF WRATH 67 


descried in this life is the personal moral deterioration of 
the sinner. ‘This, which is certainly the worst of all conse- 
quences, is still declared to be clear proof of the punitive 
wrath of God. But, apart from the fact that it is odd to 
make the sinner’s increase in sinfulness a particular act of 
Divine goodness, closer observation shows that moral de- 
generacy is not painful to its subject. If the scourge of 
righteous wrath is felt here, it is, as we have seen, the inno- 
cent involved in the consequences who are the whipping- 
boys. If a religious significance must be found for the par- 
ticular pain and anguish caused by the particular acts called 
‘sin,’ it must be rather the ethical persuasiveness of vicarious 
suffering than retributive pain. But again, moral degen- 
eracy is a disease that attacks the innocent as well as the 
guilty. “To argue that it proves Divine justice shows slight 
observation. How many children are born degenerate be- 
cause of the sins of their parents! How many women, 
starting fairly as loyal wives, are gradually brutalised by 
ill-treatment, ceaseless work and privation! Have not whole 
populations, time and again, been rendered degenerate by 
war or famine or pestilence or slavery, which no act of 
theirs has provoked? ‘The community is roused to find a 
remedy, but nature suggests that vengeance is no remedy. 
Is it not nonsense to talk of any working of consequence 
that we can see as an evidence of God’s punitive wrath? 
We may, if we choose, assume it in the far vistas of a future 
world: we do not see it here. Do heroes, who rush into 
flood and fire to save their neighbours come out unscathed? 
Here, in one town, is an aged fireman, twenty years an 
agonised invalid because of injuries contracted in saving a 
child. ‘There, in another town, is a mother melancholy 
mad, a nuisance to herself and the world, her state brought 


68 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


on by the long strain of devoted work and self-privation in 
the effort to rear her children in virtuous poverty. Here, 
again, in the shadow of a cathedral, is a reformer who gave 
his all for public morality, dying derelict and alone. So we 
could count the miserable consequences of high virtue and 
never come to the end of our count. Our scoffer is entitled 
to say that we have not faced the facts of life. If there is 
a God His will must be manifest in all the vast complex of 
the causal system. We may not abstract some isolated facts 
and theorise from them. ‘The scoffer, though he maintain 
that nature is moral, insists that there is no evidence that 
the purpose of nature is within the range of ideas that circle 
round our punitive morality. So many causes produce evil, 
so much evil enters into causes that produce good, that pun- 
ishment is evidently the wrong word to use when we refer 
to the natural consequences of what we call ‘sin.’ 


Again, perhaps the scoffer is justified when he declares 
that our Christian psychology involves a belief in ‘the policy 
of frightfulness.’ 

The students of modern psychology and pedagogy and 
penal codes have pointed out that what real goodness men 
have, they learn by the attraction of good, and that what 
morality is whipped into them is as easily whipped out of 
them whenever circumstances may chance to raise a heavier 
whip on the other side. A man who is righteous from mo- 
tives of fear will be wicked when virtue involves alarming 
consequences. Many voices of these good folk at work upon 
social science have been raised in expostulation with the 
orthodox. Some have pointed out that the real saviours of 
the hardened and the vicious have had power to overcome 
evil in exact proportion to their lack of punitive wrath and 


THE WORSHIP OF WRATH 69 


their power of forgiveness and fellowship. Others are tell- 
ing us that the subconscious fear of punishment contracted 
in childhood is the cause of half our nervous diseases, ill- 
humours, and habitual deceits. Others, again, are showing 
us that when attention is fixed upon fear of punishment, 
it is never concerned with the fear of evil desires. “Che mur- 
derer restrained by fear of hanging still desires to kill; the 
thief afraid of prison still desires to rob; and the desire, 
if choked off in one direction, fructifies in many other forms 
of social ill. These reformers ask if the fear of sin would 
not be a nobler emotion for the Church to inculcate than 
fear of punishment. Once again, our statesmen admit that 
fear of punishment does not extort from men or tribes or 
nations the maximum of compliance. ‘Threats and penal- 
ties, they say, are only to be resorted to after diplomatic 
methods have failed, and are admittedly less effective to 
compass the desired end. 

The scoffer is very bold when he laughs at our orthodox 
psychology. He says that, in spite of the fact that the his- 
tory of our penal law has proved that the popular passion 
for hurting criminals has only and always resulted in the 
increase of crime, our Christian spokesmen still declare that 
if the desire to hurt the sinner be eliminated from our ab- 
horrence of sin, sin will increase. He asks if this popular 
passion for hurting offenders has not always distracted at- 
tention from any real loathing of the offence. Do men who 
would lynch murderers hate murder? Do those who would 
have men flogged for cruelty hate cruelty? Do priests who 
would cut off schismatics hate schism? Does France, in 
seeking to punish Germany for trying to domineer, hate 
domineering? ‘The scoffer ends where he began: The way 
of France with Germany is unkind, but it is still more 


70 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


unwise. He shrugs his shoulders and asks, What else can 
we expect in Christendom? Are not multitudes of white- 
robed choir-boys still soaking just such morality into their 
subconscious minds by constant mechanical repetition of 
psalms that associate it with the highest good? 

The scoffer at Christianity has a vision of creative evolu- 
tion inspired by infinite Mind—Mind whose Wisdom and 
Beauty is faintly suggested alike by the splendid majesty 
of the stars and by the colour and symmetry of the micro- 
scopic flower. He sees, in the midst of the vast, certain 
weak creatures emerging with the awful power of freedom. 
Before them lies the opportunity of raising themselves from 
the companionship of brutes to that of creative spirits. Frail 
and of uncertain purpose, these specks of undeveloped men- 
tal initiative attempt the new experiment of self-directed 
life. Many are the doors by which they may toilsomely 
ascend from the life centred in sensuous impressions to friend- 
ship with eternal Mind. Or they may yield to the impulses 
inherited from their unfree ancestors, and, using their higher 
wit amiss, sink lower than they. No tragedy this drama 
of the free-born; for in true tragedy eternal good is hidden 
in temporal anguish; but what high value is hidden in the 
failure of the free to grasp an opportunity of boundless 
good? Can any who have within them the living spring of 
compassion fail to pity sentient things who, having the power 
to pass successive’ doors, all open to an eternal joy, are 
still by inclination crawling on into slime and darkness? 
What, asks the scoffer, is the Christian doctrine concerning 
the Infinite Wisdom who inspires the creative process and 
has given to half-developed life the terrific gift of freedom? 
Our doctrine is that the Eternal Wisdom may be called 
by the name of Love, and yet that Love turns in wrath 


THE WORSHIP OF WRATH 71 


unspeakable against those who, having received this most dan- 
gerous gift, have used it to their own loss. They are down, 
and yet they are to be kicked by Eternal Love. ‘The scoffer 
recites the high poetry we Christians use to symbolise this 
attitude of Eternal Love.—“I will tread them in mine anger 
and trample them in my fury.”+ “He that sitteth in the 
heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.” ? 
“Then shall appear the wrath of God in the day of ven- 
geance, which obstinate sinners, through the stubbornness 
of their hearts, have heaped upon themselves. . . . Then 
shall they call upon me (saith the Lord) but I will not 
hear; they shall seek me early, but they shall not. find 
me. . . . O terrible voice of most just judgment, which 
shall be pronounced upon them, when it shall be said unto 
them, Go ye cursed, into the fire everlasting.” ° 

The scoffer also quotes snatches of modern hymns which 
attempt to harness the apocalyptic imagery of punitive re- 
ligion to the car of Divine progress: 

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; 

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are 

stored; 


He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible, swift 
sword.” * 


The scoffer who is moral but profane tells us that if 
God exists, and is just, it is true that the whole universe 
must be moving to some just end, and our high values must 
be divinely inspired; but that our best current values are 
already transcending Christian values, and the universe is 
attuned to a different ideal of justice. He assures us that, 


* Isa. Ixiii, Epistle for Easter Monday. 

* Ps. ii, Psalm for Easter Sunday. 

* Commination Service, read on Ash Wednesday. 
* American Battle Hymn. 


72 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


although he does not anticipate Divine wrath, he would per- 
sonally prefer to be bound to a millstone and sunk in the 
sea rather than, in the present world crisis, write apologies 
for a faith that exalts ill-will to heaven and imagines the 
passion for hurting to exist in the bosom of God. 


ESSAY V 
BEYOND JUSTICE 


Since the rise of modern science traditional conceptions 
of our universe have been corrected in almost all depart- 
ments of knowledge. There is one notable exception: 
the notion of ideal morality still thrust upon us, not only 
by civil and international law, but also by Religion, is pre- 
Baconian. It is time to raise the question whether Nature 
may not be trying to teach us something about a higher 
morality than any man has yet developed. A great deal of 
nonsense is talked about morality and Nature. Conven- 
tional religious thinkers, on the one side, are for ever argu- 
ing that reward of merit and punishment of evil can always 
be discovered, if we look below the surface, in the scheme 
of nature. On the other side, the exponents of the ethics 
of Naturalism assert that Nature is palpably non-moral, 
since no such correspondence between happenings and desert 
can be detected in the system of causation. In particular, 
the religious apologist has been wont to insist that Nature 
displays justice, because justice is his test of good purpose in 
the universe; while the sceptic asserts that Nature is unjust, 
and therefore denounces the universe as an evil and godless 
thing. The contention of this essay is that both parties in 
this dispute are wrong. Both are assuming an @ priori con- 
ception of what is ideally good, and by the light of that 
conception are pronouncing on the facts to be explained. 
73 


74 GOD'S WAY WITH MAN 


The first thing that confronts the man of to-day who is 
willing to look facts in the face and think, is the striking 
difference between the principles implied in Nature’s method 
of training and disciplining her children, as revealed by 
scientific research and the methods of government, and the 
concomitant conceptions of legal justice which man—social 
and free-choosing animal as he is—has developed. ‘This 
distinction can be blurred only at the cost either of ignoring 
scientific fact or of confusing moral issues. 

It is, however, only the scientific mind that is, as yet, 
fully aware of this opposition. Popular ethical conceptions 
are largely conditioned by social law; and minds steeped in 
legal morality have always imposed a subjective interpreta- 
tion, borrowed from legal theory, upon the facts of man’s 
origin, nature and destiny. ‘There is a passage in the drama 
of Job in which God says, in effect: “Did I produce all this 
wonderful creation which you see by Myself—I, of My 
own original genius? or did I ask help of you?” In the 
great drama, the question is one of majestic sarcasm; it 
caused Job to realise how small was his own intelligence; 
and the reader is made to feel how infinitely less grand the 
Work had been had man’s help been sought. But do all 
those who explain, or who arraign, the Universe pause to 
ask how far the moral standard by which they judge it has 
been created by themselves? 

As we review the high road of evolution from, let us say, 
the first amoeba to the writers of The Daily Mirror or The 
Hibbert Journal, we see a process very unlike any of man’s 
devising; but our moralists are slow to assume that it is 
superior. “The way that man would have accomplished the 
business is well seen in all the Creation legends, and espe- 
cially in those which have been adopted in the annals of our 


BEYOND JUSTICE 78 


Western civilisation flowing, as it does, from the wells of 
Hebrew and Roman law and Greek speculations on justice. 
We, in the persons of our theologians, would certainly have 
advised that humanity should come upon the scene of its 
earthly pilgrimage suddenly, intelligent and perfectly capable 
of choosing between good and evil; that God should at once 
reveal Himself to them as Lawgiver and Judge, and also, 
indeed, as Policeman and Executioner. Science, the great 
revealer, has taught us that man did not come upon the scene 
thus fully equipped. All undeveloped as were his powers of 
reason and self-control, he first only derived from his an- 
cestors in herd and pack a strong sense of obligation, a sense 
of ‘ought’ and ‘needs must,’ an instinctive fear of the con- 
sequences of disobedience, necessary for the survival of the 
species. If we go to those who teach us about the habits of 
herd and pack and flock and swarm, we discover what sum- 
mary execution is visited upon the individual who in any way 
violates the habit formed with a view to the common in- 
terest, and animistic man, with his rudimentary habits of 
reflection, able only to think and reason and imagine as our 
children do, imagined many a fantastic, unseen power to 
explain the sense of ‘ought’ and the inherited instinctive fear. 
His laws were not handed down to him from heaven, for 
him to preserve or defile. All unfit as he was to reason 
clearly, to understand his surroundings and, above all, him- 
self, to control himself, even in such matters as he could 
understand—all unfit as he was, he had to make his own 
laws (weird things they were at first) ; and he had to learn 
to replace the blind motions of instinct by such government 
as would ensure the safety and continuance of the tribe 
or colony. 

When written history takes up the tale, we see the same 


76 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


method of creation going on. Man, who slowly came into 
existence through countless millenniums of unreasoning an- 
cestors, is, by effort and exercise, developing his own pow- 
ers, and by trial and experiment building up a changing 
civilisation. 

What ideal of goodness or righteousness can we derive 
from Nature’s methods and results? We need to bring out 
all the candour we possess, and polish it as we would a neg- 
lected mirror, before we can face this question fairly ; because 
our very language is deceptive and all words have been 
fashioned by the very tradition we must challenge. 

In the first place, let us notice that the natural conse- 
quences of human action may be divided into those that 
come upon the doer as a result of external conditions, and 
those psychological effects which obtain in the character of 
the doer. In the external sphere of things nature takes no 
account of motive or intention; action that traverses her 
habits produces dire results. A man may brave the danger 
of fire in order to save life or in order to steal property, 
but in either case, if fire touch him, he is burned. If we 
define moral wrong as any desire or action which violates 
the sense of duty in the soul of the man who desires or acts, 
it becomes obvious, not only that wrong action may be in 
complete harmony with natural law, but also that it may 
be in harmony with any code of human morality other than 
that which the culprit happens to recognise. A man, then, 
may do something which violates his conscience—as, for ex- 
ample, refusing to keep an appointed fast—which may, as it 
were, rejoice the heart of nature and cause her to give him a 
reward. He may also sear his own conscience by perform- 
ing an action which good men in another land or in a later 
age would consider meritorious, as, for example, abetting the 


BEYOND JUSTICE 77 


escape of a slave or a hunted heretic. While, therefore, it 
is true that when the human soul violates its own sense of 
duty a certain moral deterioration results as a natural con- 
sequence, it is not at all true that even in this inevitable 
result of wrongdoing we can claim that nature’s moral code 
is in harmony with any accepted ethical system. 

Bad consequences follow when any living creature violates 
what we call the laws of nature, but not with any propor- 
tionate relation to guilt: if a child play with fire a whole 
town may be burned down; if a reformer be led away by 
righteous indignation he may become unreasonable and lead 
thousands astray; if monastic celibacy be preached as the 
highest ideal for generations, the lay population, deprived 
of its more serious members, deteriorates in moral character ; 
if an Oriental population, faced by an epidemic, insists, in 
obedience to its religious instincts and its moral laws, upon 
sacrificing to its gods instead of obeying medical regulations, 
the epidemic, once started, will slay its thousands. When 
such cases are seen around us to-day, they may be called— 
with the facility of the moral apologist—the results of sin- 
ning against light: we say the culprits ought to have at- 
tended to the teachings of science. But if we look back to 
the beginning of things, we see that when there was no 
light, no science, for more generations than we can count, 
for ages and millenniums, the human race suffered from 
greater or less devastation produced by mere mistake, even 
though the mistake consisted in moral and religious prac- 
tices performed with heroic self-devotion. “That such con- 
sequences appeared to child races to be the punishments of 
some capricious deity is easily explicable. Before the idea» 
of justice was developed there was no standard by which to 
rectify the mistake; but the tradition consequent on this 


78 GOD’S WAY WITH-MAN 


mistake is now no excuse for the fact that punishment and 
consequences are words still too often used as synonymous 
in slippery modern theological apologetic. ‘The same action 
may be both a punishment and a consequence, as what 
follows when a schoolboy awakes his master’s ire; but 
punishment is a term which belongs only to a system of 
legal morality: it means something visited upon a sinner 
by a conscious agent on account of the sinner’s culpa- 
bility. 

Thus Nature has neither rewards nor punishments: she 
has consequences, but she consults neither Moses nor Wester- 
marck in their distribution. Her sun shines alike on evil 
and on good; her gentle rain gives life to the thirsty lands 
of oppressor and oppressed. When rot and moss undermine 
the ruined tower, it falls, crushing whoever is beneath: 
when the little nation bursts with most righteous indignation 
in noble rebellion against a too powerful oppressor it is 
crushed, and the members of its peaceful proletariat, with 
their children that ‘know not the right hand from the left,’ 
and their ‘much cattle,’ endure the greater bulk of the conse- 
quent suffering. We know well that earthquake and fire 
and flood destroy with indiscriminate fury, arousing in men 
that sympathy and compassion which only the sight of suf- 
fering obviously undeserved can elicit. 

Are we, then, to assume that Nature is non-moral? Or 
is it possible that Nature manifests purpose but our moral- 
ists have failed to interpret that purpose? For those who 
believe in God with a belief founded upon an inference from 
human values and tested by religious experience must affirm 
that Nature, even external and physical nature, and still 
more nature as seen in human psychology, is a manifestation 
of His character, and must therefore be moving under some 


BEYOND JUSTICE 79 


Divine purpose and working to some good end. We have 
ceased to be polytheistic: we do not believe in a conflict of 
deities. Two are too many for our understanding: even the 
dual power, Satan, has fallen from heaven. If God exists, 
all things must be working together for good. It does not 
follow that all things are now good, that there is in the 
nature of things no right or wrong. 

Let us first ask what sort of good Nature appears to aim 
at. We may then discover what Nature would eradicate as 
wrong. If within Nature there is purpose, one part of that 
purpose has evidently been to teach man to cultivate his 
powers of observation, of analysis and comparison and of 
inference. Without these he was the sport of natural forces: 
by cultivating these he is slowly becoming the master of 
those forces. Physical nature puts a premium on intellectual 
industry and genius, above all on genius which gathers the 
fruits of industry and makes a new leap therefrom, com- 
manding in mankind a new venture of scientific faith. ‘The 
other part of Nature’s purpose would appear to be to bring 
men to brotherly co-operation. The individual is powerless 
against physical dangers, and continued co-operation is im- 
possible without the sentiments of brotherhood. If within 
our psychological nature there is purpose, beginning far back 
in the time when the instincts and emotions of the higher 
animals were the crown of the biological system, as man’s 
rational nature now is, the purpose has evidently been to 
develop social character, not only by the development of the 
natural power of understanding (as we have just seen), but 
by training the conative and emotional natures so to work 
that the man may more fully adapt himself to his environ- 
ment and adapt the environment to himself. And since the 
most important part of man’s natural environment is his 


80 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


fellow-man, Nature puts a premium upon the understanding 
of social environment and upon social virtue. 

We may test this conclusion by observing that the line of 
human advance has been toward intellectual life and brother- 
hood. If we examine Prof. MacDougall’s classification of 
the primitive instincts—and that classification will serve us 
as well as any other—we see in primitive man the instincts 
of parental protection and curiosity, with the other strong 
primary instincts of pugnacity, of sex, of flight from an ob- 
ject of fear and repulsion from an object of disgust, the 
gregarious instinct, the instincts of self-display and of self- 
abasement: but let us here note that in the higher animals 
we find all these instincts already strongly developed; those 
of curiosity and mutual protection are still rudimentary. 
Curiosity is there, among the animals, but not obviously, 
and it does not appear to be of great utility; the instinct of 
parental protection is markedly there, but is exercised in a 
very partial and temporary way, belonging almost exclusively 
to the female, and to her only for a few weeks after the 
birth of offspring. Yet in the panorama of human history, 
along what line has man’s greatest development come? We 
find him, in early stages, full-grown and full-blown in his 
instincts of belligerence and flight and repulsion and self- 
assertion, in the instinct to cringe before a greater power, 
the gregarious instinct and the instinct of sex. ‘The instinct 
of parental protection has developed, but not far; for ex- 
cept in such tribal life as made numerous children an ad- 
vantage, we find the destruction of superfluous offspring 
common. And curiosity—the question of ‘why?’ and ‘what?’ 
—that also is stronger in primitive man than among the 
animals, but still rudimentary. But progress in human wel- 
fare has depended only upon the development of these two 


BEYOND JUSTICE 81 


instincts of curiosity and of protection: the one has caused 
the whole development of man’s rational life, has created 
science and, by developing his power of criticism, has refined 
his wsthetic and moral perceptions and enabled him to 
choose at times between his instinctive impulses: the other 
—the instinct of protection—has been the cause of all human 
progress in both justice and mercy. Man is no better fighter 
now than he was before history began; perhaps he is even 
less violent and less courageous; his sexual passion; his desire 
to live in communities; his desire to shun what is fearful 
or disagreeable; his desire to vaunt himself, or to cringe 
before a tyrant, are not more strong in him to-day than they 
were—to use an old theological phrase—before the Flood. 
But the advance in the development of his natural desire for 
knowledge and his natural desire to protect the weak and 
unfortunate is stupendous. Creative evolution is making 
him make himself. He can only persist by becoming more 
intellectual and more brotherly. 

If we doubt this we may examine human advance in more 
detail. Let us consider, for example, the difference between 
the tigress nursing her cubs and—say—any statesman of 
to-day of average good feeling and virtue in any Christian 
or non-Christian country, say Japan. We may take two of 
whom we know something. M. Poincaré and Mr Baldwin. 
There is nothing wanting in the mercy and kindness of the 
tigress toward her own cubs for the few weeks that they 
are dependent upon her. It is the limitation of her protec- 
tive self-devotion that makes her the symbol of unreasoning 
ferocity. She has no kindly feeling toward the cubs of any 
other tigress, and none for her own when they are grown. 
She would tear her own mother if she disputed the prey 
with her, and she recognises no other family relation. Her 


82 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


feeling for her mate appears to be transient and utilitarian. 
M. Poincaré, on the other hand, would devote himself to 
the protection, not only of every baby belonging to the 
French nation, but of every adult also. His instinct of 
protection, again, is very limited, but consider the enormous 
advance! And no doubt every normal man in France would 
exhibit as wide a protective instinct, and many would show a 
wider. If we turn to Mr Baldwin and the better sort of 
Britons, we seem to see an even greater development of pro- 
tective kindliness, although it may, of course, be mere national 
conceit to say so, for in time past we have claimed, with per- 
haps only moderate justification, that England was the pro- 
tector of weaker nations. Such claim was, in the intention 
of many, not all cant and hypocrisy. The majority of both 
British and Americans are perhaps still hampered by much 
of the tiger’s limitation of understanding and emotion, but 
there are also very many, in both English-speaking nations, 
as in the Scandinavian nations, whose protective instinct is 
no longer national but humanitarian. The Quaker relief 
organisations, supplying, as they have done, workers for 
all other international relief undertakings, are a_ strik- 
ing example, because quiet, effective and persistent indus- 
try is always a truer index to character than such tran- 
sient and emotional benevolence as produces funds in all 
civilised centres for the victims of any dramatic dis- 
aster. 

Is it not evident that it is the growth of this protective 
instinct, extending from the little child to the grown child, 
thrown over the mate when he or she needs protection, ele- 
vated until the parent as much as the babe becomes a charge 
upon the family; widening out from the family to the chil- 
dren, the aged and the necessitous of the tribe, and finally 


BEYOND JUSTICE 83 


to the modern nation, that has produced whatever degree of 
mutual welfare humanity may now enjoy? 

Let us, again, consider the difference between the savage, 
investigating with childlike or animal curiosity some new 
object of interest, and M. Pasteur in his bacteriological 
laboratory, or Dr Frazer investigating the folk-lore of the 
Old Testament. Cows will walk round and round and 
stare at a traveller’s cloak left in their pasture. “The sav- 
age, perceiving a new star in the heavens, will invent a fan- 
tastic myth to account for it. “The modern scientist, rising 
above aimless wonder and speculative imagination, seeks for 
fact and develops that unquenchable thirst for truth and 
reality which has curbed and trained and strengthened hu- 
man imagination, has harnessed natural forces, setting them 
to work on all the areas of land and sea for man’s benefit, 
and is teaching him how to discipline and use to the best 
advantage his natural powers. 

Is it not clear that if what we call nature in our biological 
development has psychological purpose, it is to train man’s 
character, especially by the increase of his intellectual powers 
and his protective activities? 

Let us now turn, by contrast, to those imaginings of the 
universe which were evidently convenient, if not necessary, 
to all the early stages of human civilisation. 

In human communities, from the first, what necessity 
knew was law. Forced by natural danger into societies, 
the art of controlling anti-social impulses became the art of 
life. Understanding his natural human environment im- 
perfectly, man could not fashion a government in harmony 
with nature. The methods of nature and of human govern- 
ment early began to diverge, and have diverged more and 
more; but they are in history inextricably mixed together 


84 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


because nature provided material and worked its own way 
in the midst of artificial taboos and codes of law. Able to 
draw inferences, not only from what he saw but from what 
he imagined; with his ability to choose between his impulses 
—directing interest to one or the other; man could not 
flourish without producing such picturesque conceptions of 
law and law-giver, official punisher and judge, as would rule 
the imagination. ‘These were necessary to life, because pub- 
lic opinion educated by these and supported by these (the 
sanction of all government) was necessary. Public opinion, 
which is our name for current moral sentiment, reminds us 
of the child’s puzzle—Which was created first, the hen or 
the egg? Man, still in the process of creation, the instru- 
ment and subject of his own self-creation as a social being, 
is always consciously forming and unconsciously formed by, 
the public moral sentiment, which the race secretes and lives 
by as bees secrete and live on honey. ‘To fashion the opin- 
ion or sentiment required for the moulding of the instincts 
of belligerence with its sentiment of resentment, and the 
instinct of protection with its compassionate emotion, the 
racial mind unconsciously used also the instincts of awe and 
self-abasement, and fashioned a legal mythology and a legal 
religion. 

From the very beginning man has always sought to build 
himself a Holy City. The formation of every absurd taboo, 
the attribution of powers to the living totem, the carving of 
every grotesque fetish, were all efforts towards the produc- 
tion of an ideal human society. The laws formed to pre- 
serve the achievement—whatever achievement it was—in 
this direction, the punishments meted out to those who would 
violate such laws, all belonged to the same effort—the search 
for the ideal state; and the strangest part of our human 


BEYOND JUSTICE 85 


history is that the Holy City in all its stages—even in its 
earliest, absurd, nasty and worse than beastly, stages—was 
always seen as let down from heaven. ‘The laws were al- 
ways the laws of God, however the Divinity might be con- 
ceived. ‘The punishments meted out were the punishments 
of God, and were given to avert the much worse punish- 
ments which the God meted out on his own initiative—the 
storm, the flood, the drought, the pestilence. As the use of 
the frontal brain, and with its use the refining of esthetic 
and moral perceptions, develops, we see in human history the 
effort to construct the ideal state producing results very di- 
vers?, sometimes better and sometimes worse, but on the 
whole tending to produce the greater welfare of the greater 
number as the ages have moved on. Humanity is still 
quite young: on any scientific computation of the duration 
of the earth’s heat, humanity has still some millions of years 
in which to develop the ideal state. But looking back we 
can see that what advance has been made in the art of social 
construction has been achieved by the tempering of what 
man called justice by the developing protective instinct. 
Government by force has always existed, might resting upon 
the acquiescence or approval of public opinion. But govern- 
ments have only promoted conditions making for the welfare 
of the majority in proportion as the ideal of justice has been 
developed, both by rulers and by ruled, in harmony with the 
growth of the protective instinct. Very noble has been the 
ever intenser pursuit of an ideal justice. Noblest of all the 
world’s martyrs are those who have died to uphold what they 
believed to be the ideal justice—for the art of social living, 
which is the well-being of the race, has so far depended 
upon the knowledge and practice of justice. Yet let us 
notice that this noble conception which man calls justice # 


86 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


essentially a legal conception. It is built up from notions of 
legal procedure. But law has nothing to do with goodness, 
only with behaviour. Every community has a right to re- 
quire certain behaviour from its members. It is necessary, 
e.g., that men should not steal. Justice requires whatever 
the community thinks necessary to prevent the act of theft. 
Such justice has nothing to do with the desire to steal. Hu- 
man law does not concern itself at all with whether men 
are good or bad at heart. As long as the revisers of 
human law are seeking to prevent, or put an end to, 
bad behaviour, no fault can be found with a justice which 
is as much tempered with mercy as the development of 
the community will permit. But what we need to realise 
is that law, except in its function of public educator, does 
not touch the issue of true goodness or real wickedness. A 
man may hunger and thirst to do right or to do wrong: 
the law has nothing to say concerning the springs of con- 
duct. 

“But human governments have not so far been able to 
stand without projecting themselves, like the Brocken spectre, 
upon the heavens. The public opinion needed for their 
support was formed by attributing legal morality and legal 
justice to God. ‘This was done simply and honestly in the 
centuries when behaviour was the whole of virtue. It was 
done traditionally, and gradually with less and less honesty 
of moral apologetic when man began to perceive that true 
virtue consisted in the love of virtue, which could only come 
into existence by the attraction of beauty and truth. In the 
Book of Jeremiah we are told, “I the Lord search the heart,” 
in the Epistles of James that no fountain can yield both salt 
water and fresh, and in the Gospel of Matthew that only a 
good tree brings forth good fruit. In history we can see 


BEYOND JUSTICE 87 


plainly that, so long as human ideals of government were 
almost exclusively military, God—whether Jehovah or Jove 
—was a God of hosts, of battles, of tyrannical caprice. 
When, by the just resentment of the oppressed and a further 
development of the protective impulse, a better justice was 
developed, God became more and more judicial, the Giver 
of amended codes, the Judge before whose bar king and 
slave alike were arraigned. 

Our question to-day is whether the mythology of legal 
justice is not obsolescent and as hampering to our civilisation 
to-day as was the God whose only right was might in the 
days when Hebrew and Roman laws were taking on the 
colour of reflective justice. In Western civilisation the ca- 
pricious Zeus or Jove did not go down before the God of 
early Hebrew mythology revealed in the Books of Judges 
and Joshua, but before a Jehovah who was the embodiment 
of the best in late Hebrew and Roman law, a law influ- 
enced by the highest Greek speculation on the nature of 
justice. ‘The character.and message of Jesus Christ could 
not be made catholic in the Empire until identified with 
the legal Jehovah. It is a serious question to-day whether 
what we have called Christian civilisation does not need to 
slough off its legal mythology if it is not to fail. The law 
and justice necessary to human life must, if they are to 
continue adequate, be progressively modified by growing 
knowledge and developing compassion. ‘To this end it is 
now necessary that they should be seen as human and tem- 
poral, not as divine and eternal. 

If we examine the annuals of our own religion and our 
own law, from their earliest beginnings until now, we shall 
find two strains of effort toward, and achievement of, the 
Good, two groups of notions concerning it. We shall find 


88 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


these from the very first in conflict, and the busy brains of 
all who uphold official religion always at work to argue an 
inner unison between them. Retributive justice, which is 
invented to curb and control the full-grown instinct of re- 
sentful combat, and mercy, which wells up from the natural 
heart of parental protection—these two have in all ages 
appeared to the plain man and to the prophet to differ. 
Mercy, mere mercy, like Nature, knows nothing of moral 
desert. If you could prove to a tigress that one of her 
cubs had infringed the rights of an alien, would it make any 
difference in her determination to protect her cub? No 
normal, unsophisticated mother is willing to see her help- 
less child in the clutches of punitive justice. Wherever 
the passion of mercy has sway, the escaped convict is 
hidden and nourished, the runaway slave is helped to 
freedom. 

All moral action has a basis in instinct; instinct when by 
reflection it is sublimated into principle, becomes moral. 
When the instinct of mercy is thus developed by reflection 
it is found that the merciful have a far more intense antip- 
athy than have the just to all sins that bring evil conse- 
quences upon the community; for the merciful seek always 
and at great self-sacrifice to get rid of the cause of sin. 
Mercy, like Nature, offers to combat sinfulness by the 
persuasive power of innocent suffering. ‘The merciful, with 
piercing insight, have always perceived, not only that most 
sinners are more sinned against by the world than sinning, 
but also that the term ‘sinner’ denotes, not a human being 
but an abstraction; for all concrete sinners are in some 
points, and often in most points, virtuous persons. And 
furthermore, the merciful, with a wisdom never granted to 
the just, have always perceived that no conduct is truly 


BEYOND JUSTICE 89 


good unless its motive is the love of goodness, and to the 
development of the love of goodness all penal regulations are 
irrelevant. 

Retributive justice, on the other hand, counts forgiveness 
a sin until the demands of justice are satisfied. “The oppo- 
sition between justice and mercy is revealed most finely and 
clearly, not in lower forms, but in the highest ideals of jus- 
tice the world has produced and religion has attributed to 
God. Retributive justice demands that the criminal or 
sinner suffer even when suffering is futile to reform or 
deter. Prof. Westermarck says: 


“Resentment gives way to forgiveness only in the case of re- 
pentance, not in the case of incorrigibility. Hence, not even the 
reformationist regards incorrigibility as a legitimate ground for 
exempting a person from punishment, although this flatly contra- 
dicts his theory about the true aim of all punishment (1.¢., reforma- 
tion). . . . Now it may be thought that men have no right to give 
vent to their moral resentment in a way which hurts their neigh- 
bours unless some benefit may be expected from it.... It is a 
notion of this kind that lies at the bottom of the utilitarian theories 
of punishment. They are protests against purposeless infliction of 
pain, against crude ideas of retributive justice, against theories 
hardly in advance of the low feelings of the popular mind.... 
As we have seen they ignore the fact that a punishment, in order 
to be recognized as just, must not transgress the limits set down 
by moral disapproval, that it must not be inflicted on innocent 
persons, that it must be proportioned to the guilt, that offenders 
who are amenable to discipline must not be treated more severely 
than incorrigible criminals. These theories also seem to exag- 
gerate the deterring or reforming influence which punishments 
exercise upon criminals, whilst, in another respect, they take too 
narrow a view of its social usefulness. Whether its voice inspire 
fear or not, whether it wake up a sleeping conscience or not, 


* Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, Vol. I, pp. 88- 
90, 92. 


90 GOD'S WAY WITH MAN 


punishment, at all events, tells people in plain terms what, in the 
opinion of the society, they ought not to do....It is the in- 
stinctive desire to inflict counter-pain that gives to moral indigna- 
tion its most important characteristic. Without it, moral condemna- 
tion and the ideas of right and wrong would never have come 
into existence. Without it, we should no more condemn a bad man 
than a poisonous plant. The reason why moral judgments are 
passed on volitional beings, or their acts, is not merely that they 
are volitional, but that they are sensitive as well; and however 
much we try to concentrate our indignation on the act, it derives 
its peculiar flavour from being directed against a sensitive agent. 
I have heard persons of a highly sympathetic cast of mind assert 
that a wrong act awakens in them only sorrow, not indignation; 
but though sorrow be the predominant element in their state of 
mind, I believe that, on a closer inspection, they would find there 
another emotion as well, one in which there is immanent an ele- 
ment of hostility, however slight. It is true that the intensity of 
moral indignation cannot always be measured by the actual desire 
to cause pain to the offender; but its intensity seems nevertheless 
to be connected with the amount of suffering which the indignant 
man is willing to let the offender undergo in consequence of the 
offence.” 

Dr James Moffatt, the present editor of The Expositor, 
in an article in The British Weekly (Oct. 26, 1922) entitled 
“The New Jesus,’ maintains that the teaching of Jesus 
Christ, made forgiveness between man and man wait always 
upon the repentance of the evil-doer. He calls this teach- 
ing “the element of justice in God.’ Dr Goudge, Regius 
Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, tells us 
in The Church Quarterly (April 1923) “God no more 
wills punishment than He wills sin. But given the sin, 
He wills the punishment. . . . It is quite true that 
we do not at present see the system exactly adapted in de- 
tail to the desert of each individual or group; but that does 
not affect the fact that to a large extent we do see it so 


BEYOND JUSTICE gI 


adapted. If we did not, Faith could descry no moral uni- 
verse.” 

It will be seen from these extracts that Prof. Wester- 
marck’s explanation of human justice is valid—but he is 
merely explaining the present stage of the development of 
civilisation. His book is filled with the history of many past 
stages of civil progress; he does not treat of future stages, 
still less of eternal truth. The religious writers quoted, on 
the other hand, are representing God as having no better way 
of dealing with wrongdoers than man has; as having no more 
mercy for the unrepentant than man has, and they seek to 
identify eternal good with the legal morality which has 
so far been convenient to man. ‘To those of us who be- 
lieve that God is the sustaining and guiding power of creative 
evolution, it is evident that we must look for God’s self- 
revelation to man either in the immanent force which has 
caused man’s development to depend on the expansion of 
his understanding and his protective emotion or in the 
legal myth of official religion. The time has come when 
we must ask if we can serve the two masters—deified law 
and deified grace, supreme justice and supreme mercy. 

Look, for example, at two nations, both suffering terrible 
disaster. Nature by overwhelming Japan with unmerited 
calamity, has made the whole world akin for the time. In- 
ternational law, by seeking to overwhelm certain popula- 
tions by retributive penalties, has plunged Europe into 
greater and more deep-seated animosities. We do well to 
reflect on these things. If we look upon the panorama of 
our development, we see that men, developing wider and 
deeper sympathies, have always had their compassion in- 
hibited, not only by natural selfishness, but by legal notions 
of desert. Just in so far as an individual or nation has 


92 GOD’S WAY WITH MAN 


been regarded as criminal, compassion has been checked as 
a vice. ‘This checking of compassion, this sanctification of 
resentment by a legal morality, now that the world has be- 
come one huge neighborhood, will surely entail intolerable 
evils if it be not stopped by the formation in our great 
society of a higher idea of good and of God. 

Nature, by creating danger, pushes men to co-operation 
and brotherhood. Legal religion has taught separation by 
the demarcation of rights and privileges. Nature pushes 
men to intellectual progress and enterprise. Legal religion 
demands unreasoning belief and obedience. Nature pushes 
to wider and ever wider protective activities. Legal religion 
would urge the condemnation of half mankind on the 
ground of desert. Nature persuades the sinner by inflict- 
ing innocent suffering. Legal religion insists that he can 
be spurred to virtue by threats and penalties. Nature sug- 
gests that retributive justice has a subordinate place as a 
human convenience, a threshold to the good life. Legal 
religion has exalted retributive justice to the supreme place, 
the throne of God. 

It is for those who ‘profess and call themselves Christian’ 
to ask themselves very seriously whether a study of nature 
does not make retributive justice appear paltry and whether 
the protective and tender emotions, which Jesus Christ at- 
tributed in their supreme degree to God, can be identified 
with the retributive justice commonly assumed to belong 
to God. 

What is the alternative to legal religion? Is it not just 
the best elements in that very religion breaking through the 
hard chrysalis and leaving it behind? In a spiritual uni- 
verse the souls that love the good will find unending satis- 
faction in endless enterprise of creative power and heroic 


BEYOND JUSTICE 93 


adventure, while those who love evil can experience only 
transient pleasures and disappointments that can only end 
with the turning of desire to true delight. Is it therefore 
immoral to conceive of God as an eternal Friend to all 
sentient things, inspiring in all, as they will receive it, 
power to be wise, to be brotherly, to enter daily and hourly 
more deeply into sympathy with nature and with Himself. 

It is even possible that when the life of the Divine Founder 
of Christianity is interpreted by the insight of true loyalty, 
it may be seen that His essential message was to enthrone 
in Heaven only the protective activity and tender emotions 
of the paternal instincts, and to give to man such confidence 
in the creative wisdom of this All-Father that he will not 
fear to discard any doctrine ‘said by them of old time’ if 
found irrelevant to the only true morality, that of genuine 
inward aspiration. 








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